Rigorous Adaptive Management Approaches to Benefit Fish Populations and Aquatic Ecosystems

True adaptive management (AM) is a rigorous approach for designing and implementing management actions to maximize learning about critical uncertainties that affect decisions, while simultaneously striving to meet multiple management objectives. Reputable guidance documents present AM as a 6-step cyclical process: Assess → Design → Implement → Monitor → Evaluate → Adjust. Unfortunately the term “adaptive management” has been widely misused and applied to largely ad hoc approaches, diluting its original rigorous intent. The purpose of this symposium is to at least partially rectify these misconceptions by providing conference participants with recent examples of rigorous AM design, monitoring and evaluation. The presented projects are at various stages (from pre-implementation design to several decades post-implementation of management actions), and therefore will provide a good spectrum of examples. Each speaker will select one or more steps where they’ve developed strategies and approaches that could be helpful to others, and difficult challenges that were overcome. AFS members and participants attending will benefit by getting a primer on True AM in the introductory talk, and then be exposed to a diverse set of examples by leading AM practitioners, which reinforce the concepts presented in the introduction.

The symposium has been organized as follows:

1. an introductory talk which clearly describes rigorous AM, distinguishes it from pretend AM, and sets up the talks to follow;
2. AM Tools and Insights for Habitat Enhancement Efforts with 10 talks describing projects in CA(2), Columbia Basin(2), Puget Sound(2), NE(1), NM(1), LA(1) and FL(1);
3. AM Tools and Insights for Hatchery and Fisheries Management, with 2 talks describing projects in BC and ID/OR;
4. AM Tools and Insights for Flow, Hydropower and Fisheries Management, with 6 talks describing projects in BC (3), AZ (2) and GA(1);
5. a summary of adaptive management challenges and opportunities;
6. a panel discussion; and
7. a poster session.