Agencies\u27 roles in ecosystem management: USDA Forest Service directions

The Forest Service has evolved to a new land ethic: preservation of the function, health, and productivity of ecosystems, including the production of goods and services for people. This evolution is the result of several converging streams including advances in scientific technology, emerging political directions, and realization that problems need to be addressed at the outset. A number of challenges are facing the move to ecosystem management (EM) including a number of statutory changes or clarifications, declining budgets and staff, and the need to work more closely with the other agencies. The Forest Service intends to play a leadership role in EM. The decision space for any management approach is bounded by science, political acceptability, social consequences, and economic feasibility. Although the Service has sought public input in the past under the National Forest Management Act, the effort has not been satisfactory. EM requires more collaboration between other agencies, universities, organizations, and interest groups. We must continue to advance our science. Land managers are being directed to understand the structure, function, and variability of systems to be managed, and their response to use. We have no option but to move forward with natural-resources exploitation. As government is being reinvented, we are reinventing the Forest Service including implementation of ecosystem management. We need to get away from managing individual resources to focusing on whole systems. This will require more budgetary flexibility and effective monitoring to evaluate management. We need to strengthen the Service\u27s research arm and upgrade the educational level of our personnel. We need to process and assimilate new information more efficiently, move it quickly into operations, and we will be hiring people who specialize in those functions. We need to strengthen collaboration with our sister agencies and our many constituencies. We recognize the sensitivity of the property-rights issue and seek no additional authority over private property. Our objective is to provide technical assistance to federal and state land managers and nonindustrial private owners. Our goal is leadership into the 21st century in effective resource management

The Need for a New NFMA Planning Rule

7 pages

High-resolution measurements of surface topography with airborne laser altimetry and the global positioning system

Recently, an airborne lidar system that measures laser pulse time-of-flight and the distortion of the pulse waveform upon reflection from earth surface terrain features was developed and is now operational. This instrument is combined with Global Positioning System (GPS) receivers and a two-axis gyroscope for accurate recovery of aircraft position and pointing attitude. The laser altimeter system is mounted on a high-altitude aircraft platform and operated in a repetitively-pulsed mode for measurements of surface elevation profiles at nadir. The laser transmitter makes use of recently developed short-pulse diode-pumped solid-state laser technology in Q-switched Nd:YAG operating at its fundamental wavelength of 1064 nm. A reflector telescope and silicon avalanche photodiode are the basis of the optical receiver. A high-speed time-interval unit and a separate high-bandwidth waveform digitizer under microcomputer control are used to process the backscattered pulses for measurements of terrain. Other aspects of the lidar system are briefly discussed

FAR‐sighted conservation

Abstract Conservation targets that reference historical expectations, such as maintaining specified areas of intact ecosystems, restoring degraded ones or maintaining the historic distributions of species, may not be realistic in the context of ongoing environmental change, whereas targets that aspire to accommodate the complex realities of the human‐altered and changing world tend to be too vague to implement. Using the first three recently proposed Convention on Biological Diversity post‐2020 global biodiversity Action Targets as context, we suggest a policy framework that evaluates how we might shift from an emphasis on resisting sometimes inevitable change to the development of positive directions of change for people and biodiversity. Our Anthropocene approach builds on the fact that all ecosystems have already been shaped by interactions with people and that ongoing change is inevitable. We outline a Facilitate–Accept–Resist (FAR) framework for all levels of conservation decision‐making and actions, ranging from overall conservation strategies (planning, setting targets, monitoring change, selecting indicators) to the conservation of places (sites, ecosystems, landscapes) and species, and to the provision of ecosystem services and human well‐being. For each potential decision, the approach evaluates whether, for whom and how one might facilitate, accept or resist particular changes. We highlight the value of inclusive engagement in the process to ensure that benefits from biodiversity are equitably shared. The CBD Action targets reflect tensions between maintaining historic states of nature and the Anthropocene reality of integrating people with nature and accepting change. The challenge is to operationalize the inclusivity, integration and change elements of the targets whilst not ‘abandoning’ locations that many conservationists consider to be key places for wildlife. The FAR framework represents a way to operationalize decision‐making in the face of this tension, so that the facilitation and acceptance of positive biodiversity change is adopted at least as frequently as change is resisted

Basal dynamics of Kronebreen, a fast-flowing tidewater glacier in Svalbard: non-local spatio-temporal response to water input

We evaluate the variability in basal friction for Kronebreen, Svalbard, a fast-flowing tidewater glacier. We invert 3 years (2013–15) of surface velocities at high temporal resolution (generally 11 days), to estimate the changing basal properties of the glacier. Our results suggest that sliding behaviour of Kronebreen within a year is primarily influenced by changes in water input patterns during the meltwater season and basal friction is highly variable from a year to another. At present, models usually employ parameterisations to encompass the complex physics of glacier sliding by mathematically simulate their net effect. For such ice masses with strong seasonal variations of surface melt, the spatio-temporal patterns of basal friction imply that it is neither possible nor appropriate to use a parameterisation for bed friction that is fixed in space and/or time, at least in a timescale of a few years. Basal sliding may not only be governed by local processes such as basal topography or summer melt, but also be mediated by factors that vary over a larger distance and over a longer time period such as subglacial hydrology organisation, ice-thickness changes or calving front geometry