Tidy or Tangled: How People Perceive Landscapes

Final project for PLSC480: Urban Ecology, Management of Urban Forest Edges (Spring 2016). Department of Plant Science and Landscape Architecture, University of Maryland, College Park.The ways we choose to modify and manage the landscapes around us have enormous local and global consequences. Single-family houses now dominate the suburban landscapes of Washington, D.C., including Columbia, MD. These planned housing developments typically have a clean, tidy appearance with mown grass and trimmed shrubs. Unfortunately, this ordered presentation does not provide the ecosystem services that accompany an ecologically healthy, but often more disorderly landscape: cleaner water, air, soil, and happier and healthier residents. This paper investigates how people perceive a range of landscape types and how various intervention techniques might affect their acceptance or appreciation. Understanding the way people see the landscapes around them can help Columbia’s managers, planners, designers, and residents pursue riparian restoration efforts in their neighborhoods. Dozens of researchers, inspired by Joan Nassauer’s 1995 essay, “Messy Ecosystems, Orderly Frames,” have asked how culture and aesthetics contribute to our understanding of the ecosystem. This paper is organized along those research paths: aspects of evolution, neighborhood social pressures, the role of education, design and planning impacts, and ecological-aesthetic modeling.Howard Count

Adaptive Management and NEPA: How to Reconcile Predictive Assessment in the Face of Uncertainty with Natural Resource Management Flexibility and Success

For years, public lands scholars lamented the limited success that federal agencies had in applying adaptive management decisionmaking processes in pursuit of their natural resource management responsibilities. Agency duties to comply with the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) have played a role in creating a disconnect between the theory and application of adaptive management. NEPA was designed to force agencies to predict (and consider ways to avoid) the adverse environmental impacts of actions before committing to them. Adaptive management is built on the premise that, at least in conditions of uncertainty such as those that often characterize natural resource management, acting on the basis of one-time predictive judgments is a prescription for failure. Instead, resource managers need to continuously track the consequences of their decisions, reevaluate their management approaches based on evolving evidence, and make appropriate adjustments before starting this iterative process anew.Notwithstanding the tension between the decisionmaking approaches reflected in NEPA and adaptive management, the federal land management agencies have had to figure out how to implement their NEPA responsibilities as they have increasingly resorted to adaptive management strategies. This Article analyzes the inevitable litigation that these efforts have spurred, identifying how courts have applied various aspects of NEPA’s mandates to agency resort to adaptive management. This analysis reveals that careful attention to NEPA’s requirements makes reconciliation of the tension between NEPA and adaptive management possible. The Article gleans a series of best practices that should allow agencies to benefit from the flexibility that adaptive management affords its practitioners while satisfying NEPA’s “stop and think”mandates

Adaptive Management and NEPA: How to Reconcile Predictive Assessment in the Face of Uncertainty with Natural Resource Management Flexibility and Success

For years, public lands scholars lamented the limited success that federal agencies had in applying adaptive management decisionmaking processes in pursuit of their natural resource management responsibilities. Agency duties to comply with the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) have played a role in creating a disconnect between the theory and application of adaptive management. NEPA was designed to force agencies to predict (and consider ways to avoid) the adverse environmental impacts of actions before committing to them. Adaptive management is built on the premise that, at least in conditions of uncertainty such as those that often characterize natural resource management, acting on the basis of one-time predictive judgments is a prescription for failure. Instead, resource managers need to continuously track the consequences of their decisions, reevaluate their management approaches based on evolving evidence, and make appropriate adjustments before starting this iterative process anew.Notwithstanding the tension between the decisionmaking approaches reflected in NEPA and adaptive management, the federal land management agencies have had to figure out how to implement their NEPA responsibilities as they have increasingly resorted to adaptive management strategies. This Article analyzes the inevitable litigation that these efforts have spurred, identifying how courts have applied various aspects of NEPA’s mandates to agency resort to adaptive management. This analysis reveals that careful attention to NEPA’s requirements makes reconciliation of the tension between NEPA and adaptive management possible. The Article gleans a series of best practices that should allow agencies to benefit from the flexibility that adaptive management affords its practitioners while satisfying NEPA’s “stop and think”mandates