COS 286-3 - A National Framework for Land Management Decision-making Based on Ecological Knowledge

Abstract: Land management decisions require site-specific knowledge for conservation and restoration practices to achieve desired outcomes, such as deciding where investments in carbon sequestration will be most successful. US and state government agencies, including the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS), must allocate limited resources to maximize conservation benefits using the best available science. Land managers often rely on experiences or peers for site-specific knowledge; however, many early-career land managers have insufficient experience and peer networks. Our objective is to design a nationwide repository of reliable, accessible ecosystem knowledge in support of conservation decision-making via a new organizational framework based on state-and-transition models (STMs) applied to ecological site (ES) classes. An ES class includes land with similar soil and site features and temporal dynamics. STMs represent data on multiple steady states and transitions between states. STMs serve as powerful tools for organizing site-specific knowledge about causes of change, underlying ecological process drivers, and likely outcomes of conservation and restoration practices.

We summarized literature and land manager experiences to identify key challenges and develop new strategies to link ecological information to land management decision-making via STMs. Impediments to STM use that we identified include 1) incomplete coverage and field verification of ecosystem classes, 2) insufficient data and expertise necessary to develop detailed STM content, and 3) lack of interoperability among the databases where STMs are housed and other web applications and conservation planning software used by managers. To address these problems, revised workflows have resulted in ninety percent coverage of STMs by correlating major soil components to provisional ES classes in the US. New methods have been developed to verify ES classes with specific data quality standards. Efforts to expand STM information, including dynamic soil properties (e.g., carbon sequestration potential), are now being implemented. We conclude with planned efforts to represent STM information at multiple spatial scales for different land management needs and to link STMs to conservation planning software. Collectively, these efforts will enhance the role of ecological science to directly inform site-specific conservation and restoration decision making by agencies and landowners across the US.