Making Adaptive Management Work: Lessons from the Past and Opportunities for the Future

Adaptive management (AM) promotes learning about managed systems by implementing regulations experimentally, monitoring the response, evaluating outcomes, and adapting. Despite its appeal, AM has infrequently been implemented successfully. Fisheries management provides opportunities for AM, as fisheries management actions are often replicated across large spatial scales. Successful AM experiments require identification of management objectives and options, recognition of critical uncertainties, involvement of stakeholders in the entire AM process, and commitment to monitoring and evaluation. We illustrate these components based on an AM effort resulting in major changes in management of invasive sea lamprey (Petromyzon marinus) in the Laurentian Great Lakes, and identify how these principles could be more broadly applied to fish management. Challenges to AM include designing an experimental approach that is acceptable to stakeholders while allowing learning despite high variation, identifying appropriate replicates and references, and securing resources for monitoring and evaluation. Not all management situations are suited to AM; for example, situations where outcomes cannot be measured or evaluated, or circumstances where the risk of certain outcomes is unacceptable. Numerous opportunities for AM exist in fisheries management, but successful implementation requires that the next generation of fisheries professionals serve as champions of AM where appropriate.