Please register for Stewarding transforming landscapes using the Resist-Accept-Direct framework & transformation-oriented natural & cultural science on Oct 6, 2021, 1:00 PM MDT at:
https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/4856103472912424463

An assumption of stationarity—i.e. “the idea that natural systems fluctuate within an unchanging envelope of variability”—underlies traditional conservation and natural resource management. This assumption is expressed in widespread reliance on ecological baselines to guide protection, restoration, and other management actions. Increasingly, however, managers are confronting the limits of this paradigm. Intensifying climate change—including accelerated warming, changing disturbance regimes, and more frequent and intense extreme events—combined with effects of more longstanding stressors, is making restoration of past conditions or even ‘holding the line’ in the face of inexorable human-caused change ever more difficult and costly. In response to these profound practical and philosophical challenges, managers are increasingly expanding their toolkit to include explicitly and strategically accepting or even directing human-caused ecological trajectories. New thinking in the National Park Service along these lines is expressed in several related new guidance documents including a report on the Resist-Accept-Direct (RAD) framework. The RAD framework, the culmination of years of collaboration among a diverse set of conservation partners, helps managers make informed, purposeful choices about how to respond to the trajectory of change. This presentation will (1) describe the challenge of ecological transformation, (2) introduce the RAD framework along with a detailed exploration of its application via an NPS case study, and (3) discuss how RAD-based decisions raise new ecological and social science questions that require new research approaches.

Presenters: Gregor Schuurman, Climate Change Response Program; Scott McFarland, NPS Natural Sounds and Night Skies Division; Shelley Crausbay, Conservation Science Partners