Gaming the Past: The Theory and Practice of Historic Baselines in the Administrative State

This article explores in detail the attributes and operation of historic baselines. That historic baselines are found throughout regulatory law is no accident. Particularly when the policy goal involves turning back the clock or halting an undesirable trend, historic baselines have distinct advantages compared to alternative techniques for standard setting. These advantages include rhetoric, familiarity, and flexibility. The use of the temporal reference point lies at the heart of what makes historic baselines distinct in this respect, yet it is also what makes them qualitatively different for purposes of gaming. Leveraging the past provides an additional dimension to the gaming potential found in other techniques, such as technology- or cost-based goals. This very attraction, however, equally limits historic baselines in some contexts. This limitation is most evident in climate change adaptation policy, where baselines simply do not easily fit because the policy goal is fundamentally about resetting the clock, not turning it back. There is no past to leverage when it comes to climate change adaptation. This may be true in other cases where massively transformative forces are at work, such as with the global financial crisis. Going back to the past may be appealing in these settings, but it is ultimately infeasible. Policymakers reaching for a more forward-looking policy thus should eye warily the appeal to the past embedded in historic baselines

Designing Administrative Law for Adaptive Management

Administrative law needs to adapt to adaptive management. Adaptive management is a structured decision-making method the core of which is a multi-step iterative process for adjusting management measures to changing circumstances or new information about the effectiveness of prior measures or the system being managed. It has been identified as a necessary or best practices component of regulation in a broad range of fields, including drug and medical device warnings, financial system regulation, social welfare programs, and natural resources management. Nevertheless, many of the agency decisions advancing these policies remain subject to the requirements of either the federal Administrative Procedure Act or the states’ parallel statutes. Adaptive management theorists have identified several features of such administrative law requirements — especially public participation, judicial review, and finality — as posing barriers to true adaptive management, but they have put forward no reform proposals. This Article represents the first effort in adaptive management theory to go beyond complaining about the handcuffs administrative law puts on adaptive management and to suggest a solution. The Article begins by explaining the theory and limits of adaptive management to emphasize that it is not appropriate for all or even most agency decision making. For its appropriate applications, however, we argue that conventional administrative law has unnecessarily shackled effective use of adaptive management. We show that the core values of administrative law can be implemented in ways that much better allow for adaptive management through a specialized “adaptive management track†of administrative procedures. Going further, we propose and explain draft model legislation that would create such a track for the specific types of agency decision making that could benefit from adaptive management

Adaptive Management for Ecosystem Services at the Wildland-Urban Interface

Managing the wildland-urban interface (WUI) is a widely-recognized land use problem plagued by a fractured geography of land parcels, management jurisdictions, and governance mandates and objectives. People who work in this field have suggested a variety of approaches to managing this interface, from informal governance to contracting to insurance. To date, however, none of these scholars have fully embraced the dynamism, uncertainty, and complexity of the WUI — that is, its status as a complex adaptive system. In focusing almost exclusively on the management of this interface to control wildfire, this scholarship largely ignores the factor that rampant wildfire is itself the product of incursions into important ecosystem services on both sides of the interface. In many cases, people tend to expand out towards the wildland not just for economics (cheaper housing) but also because of a suite of ecosystem services that are readily accessible at the interface, including aesthetics, a cleaner environment, and recreational opportunities. As the wildfire problem amply demonstrates, these settlers then become upset when other aspects of ecosystem function invade their lives, but those invasions include not just wildfire disasters but also more pernicious problems such as diseases, allergens, and wildlife. As such, development at the WUI can create a multifaceted desire to control several undesirable aspects of ecosystem function while simultaneously promoting the ecosystem services that residents desire, complicating land use management on both sides of a line that is itself often moving or transforming into a transition or buffer zone. To focus solely on wildfire, in other words, may oversimplify an increasingly complex management problem with significant policy implications.While we cannot and will not attempt to resolve all of these policy issues in this article, we do propose that adaptive management may provide a mechanism for dealing with the complexity of managing changing ecosystem functions and services at the WUI, even when — and perhaps especially because — the private lands and wildlands are usually subject to different land use regimes. We begin with an overview of adaptive management, then discuss the hard but common case of fractured landscape management. We then explore the potential for adaptive management to help negotiate this fractured landscape in a changing world, starting with the classic issue of wildfire management but also suggesting possible expansions

Governing for Sustainable Coasts: Complexity, Climate Change, and Coastal Ecosystem Protection

The world’s coastal ecosystems are among the most complex on Earth, and they are currently being governed unsustainably, by any definition. Climate change will only add to this complexity, underscoring the necessity of finding new ways to govern for these ecosystems’ sustainable use. After reviewing the problems facing coastal ecosystems and innovations in their governance, this article argues that governance of coastal ecosystems must move to place-based adaptive management regimes that incorporate innovative and flexible regulatory mechanisms, such as market-based incentives

Adaptive Management for Ecosystem Services at the Wildland-Urban Interface

Managing the wildland-urban interface (WUI) is a widely-recognized land use problem plagued by a fractured geography of land parcels, management jurisdictions, and governance mandates and objectives. People who work in this field have suggested a variety of approaches to managing this interface, from informal governance to contracting to insurance. To date, however, none of these scholars have fully embraced the dynamism, uncertainty, and complexity of the WUI — that is, its status as a complex adaptive system. In focusing almost exclusively on the management of this interface to control wildfire, this scholarship largely ignores the factor that rampant wildfire is itself the product of incursions into important ecosystem services on both sides of the interface. In many cases, people tend to expand out towards the wildland not just for economics (cheaper housing) but also because of a suite of ecosystem services that are readily accessible at the interface, including aesthetics, a cleaner environment, and recreational opportunities. As the wildfire problem amply demonstrates, these settlers then become upset when other aspects of ecosystem function invade their lives, but those invasions include not just wildfire disasters but also more pernicious problems such as diseases, allergens, and wildlife. As such, development at the WUI can create a multifaceted desire to control several undesirable aspects of ecosystem function while simultaneously promoting the ecosystem services that residents desire, complicating land use management on both sides of a line that is itself often moving or transforming into a transition or buffer zone. To focus solely on wildfire, in other words, may oversimplify an increasingly complex management problem with significant policy implications.While we cannot and will not attempt to resolve all of these policy issues in this article, we do propose that adaptive management may provide a mechanism for dealing with the complexity of managing changing ecosystem functions and services at the WUI, even when — and perhaps especially because — the private lands and wildlands are usually subject to different land use regimes. We begin with an overview of adaptive management, then discuss the hard but common case of fractured landscape management. We then explore the potential for adaptive management to help negotiate this fractured landscape in a changing world, starting with the classic issue of wildfire management but also suggesting possible expansions

Butterfly abundance is determined by food availability and is mediated by species traits

1. Understanding the drivers of population abundance across species and sites is crucial for effective conservation management. At present, we lack a framework for predicting which sites are likely to support abundant butterfly communities. 2. We address this problem by exploring the determinants of abundance among 1111 populations of butterflies in the UK, spanning 27 species on 54 sites. Our general hypothesis is that the availability of food resources is a strong predictor of population abundance both within and between species, but that the relationship varies systematically with species’ traits. 3. We found strong positive correlations between butterfly abundance and the availability of food resources. Our indices of host plant and nectar are both significant predictors of butterfly population density, but the relationship is strongest for host plants, which explain up to 36% of the inter-site variance in abundance for some species. 4. Among species, the host plant–abundance relationship is mediated by butterfly species traits. It is strongest among those species with narrow diet breadths, low mobility and habitat specialists. Abundance for species with generalist diet and habitat associations is uncorrelated with our host plant index. 5. The host plant–abundance relationship is more pronounced on sites with predominantly north-facing slopes, suggesting a role for microclimate in mediating resource availability. 6. Synthesis and applications. We have shown that simple measures can be used to help understand patterns in abundance at large spatial scales. For some butterfly species, population carrying capacity on occupied sites is predictable from information about the vegetation composition. These results suggest that targeted management to increase host plant availability will translate into higher carrying capacity. Among UK butterflies, the species that would benefit most from such intervention have recently experienced steep declines in both abundance and distribution. The host plant–abundance relationship we have identified is likely to be transferrable to other systems characterized by strong interspecific interactions across trophic levels. This raises the possibility that the quality of habitat patches for specialist species is estimable from rapid assessment of the host plant resource

A self-consistent dynamical model of the Milky Way disc adjusted to Gaia data

Context. Accurate astrometry achieved by Gaia for many stars in the Milky Way provides an opportunity to reanalyse the Galactic stellar populations from a large and homogeneous sample and to revisit the Galaxy gravitational potential. Aims. This paper shows how a self-consistent dynamical model can be obtained by fitting the gravitational potential of the Milky Way to the stellar kinematics and densities from Gaia data. Methods. We derived a gravitational potential using the Besancon Galaxy Model, and computed the disc stellar distribution functions based on three integrals of motion (E, Lz, I3) to model stationary stellar discs. The gravitational potential and the stellar distribution functions are built self-consistently, and are then adjusted to be in agreement with the kinematics and the density distributions obtained from Gaia observations. A Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is used to fit the free parameters of the dynamical model to Gaia parallax and proper motion distributions. The fit is done on several sets of Gaia data, mainly a subsample of the GCNS (Gaia catalogue of nearby stars to 100 pc) with G< 17, together with 26 deep fields selected from eDR3, widely spread in longitudes and latitudes. Results. We are able to determine the velocity dispersion ellipsoid and its tilt for subcomponents of different ages, both varying with R and z. The density laws and their radial scale lengths for the thin and thick disc populations are also obtained self-consistently. This new model has some interesting characteristics that come naturally from the process, such as a flaring thin disc. The thick disc is found to present very distinctive characteristics from the old thin disc, both in density and kinematics. This lends significant support to the idea that thin and thick discs were formed in distinct scenarios, as the density and kinematics transition between them is found to be abrupt. The dark matter halo is shown to be nearly spherical. We also derive the solar motion with regards to the Local Standard of Rest (LSR), finding U· = 10.79 ± 0.56 km s-1, V· = 11.06 ± 0.94 km s-1, and W· = 7.66 ± 0.43 km s-1, in close agreement with recent studies. Conclusions. The resulting fully self-consistent gravitational potential, still axisymmetric, is a good approximation of a smooth mass distribution in the Milky Way and can be used for further studies, including finding streams, substructures, and to compute orbits for real stars in our Galaxy

Accounting for spatial autocorrelation and environment are important to derive robust bat population trends from citizen science data

Monitoring wildlife populations is essential if global targets to reverse biodiversity declines are to be met. Recent analysis of data from the UK’s long-term National Bat Monitoring Programme (NBMP) suggests stable or increasing population trends for many bat species, and these statistics help inform progress towards national biodiversity targets. However, although based on robust citizen science survey designs, it is unknown how sensitive these trends are to spatial and environmental biases. Here we use Bayesian hierarchical modelling with integrated nested Laplace approximation (INLA), to examine the impact of these types of biases on the population trends using relative occupancy of four species monitored by the NBMP Field Survey in Great Britain (GB): Pipistrellus pipistrellus, P. pygmaeus, Nyctalus noctula and Eptesicus serotinus. Where possible, we also disaggregated trends to national levels using the best model per species to determine if national differences in trends remain once sampling biases are accounted for. Although we found evidence of spatial clustering in the NBMP Field Survey locations, the previously reported GB-wide population trends are broadly robust to spatial autocorrelation. In most species, accounting for spatial autocorrelation and species-environment relationships improved model fit. The nationally disaggregated models highlighted that GB-wide trends mask differences between England and Scotland, consistent with previous analysis of these data, as well as illustrating large gaps in survey effort, especially in Wales. We suggest that although bat population trends were found to be broadly robust to sampling biases present in these data, small differences could propagate over time and this impact is likely to be more severe in less structured citizen science data. Therefore, ensuring trends are robust to sampling biases present in citizen science datasets is critical to effective monitoring of progress towards biodiversity targets, managing populations sustainably, and ultimately a reversal of global declines