Managing surprising ecosystems in southern Florida

Surprises commonly occur in natural resource systems and are manifest as dramatic shifts in ecosystem structure and processes. Southern Florida ecosystems have had two such surprises in the last two decades, (1) changes in dominant plant species in freshwater marshes of the Everglades; and (2) massive die-offs of seagrass in Florida Bay. Both examples indicate a loss of ecological resilience and subsequent shifts in controlling processes or stability domains. Techniques of adaptive environmental assessment and management that confront alternative hypotheses of ecosystem change and propose management actions that allow managers to learn have provided robust responses to these surprises. Two predicates for adaptive management are sufficient resilience in the ecosystem components of a resource system and flexibility in the social system. Ecological resilience provides a buffer in the ecosystem to the inevitable failure of management actions. Social flexibility through trust and cooperation is needed if ecosystem resilience is exceeded. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.