Cereghino 2014 DRAFT Integrated Nearshore Assessment
- Last Ten Products
- Small, D., P. Smith, I. Keren, T. Quinn, P. Schlenger 2024 Fine scale movement of juvenile salmon to inform tidal fish passage restoration in Puget Sound
- Greene & Chamberlin 2024 multi-scale benefits of delta restoration for salmon
- Seedlot Selection Tool
- Bioregional Funding Facilities Funding Resources
- Cereghino 2024 draft riverscape agroforestry principles
- FEMA 2023 Flood Risk Mapping Guidance
- Cereghino 2024 Salish sea platform short intro
- Islands in the Salish Sea
- USDA Plants Database
- ESA 2024 bellingham culvert prioritization
- Product Categories
- Google scholar search
- Linked To This Product
- Wiki Rules
- Wiki text does not reflect the policy or opinion of any agency or organization
- Please adhere to our Social Contract and Style Guide
- Complain here, and be nice.
Cereghino, P. 2014. Moving towards nimble spatial reassessment. Prepared by NOAA Restoration Center for Puget Sound Partnership.
Introduction[edit]
Every spatial assessment for ecosystem management involves a group of stakeholders asking questions of a data universe to determine where and how to achieve stated objectives. These assessments are unstable. If our spatial data change, or the stakeholders change, or our values and objectives shift, or we learn something new about ecosystems, we may choose to reassess.
The goal of “integrating the Nearshore Project and Watershed Characterization” was an attempt to answer questions not adequately resolved by either assessment in isolation. By assembling a stakeholder group and defining objectives, we discovered that we were best able to answer our new and refined questions by conducting a new assessment.
This kind of repeated spatial reassessment is likely inevitable and may be desirable. There are hundreds of agents working over tens of jurisdictions to manage the nearshore ecosystem. If we never reassess our priorities based on new knowledge, we are not adapting to stakeholder interests or new information.
The risks of continuous reassessment are at least two-fold. First, if we never develop comfort with our assessment, we never act and may become paralyzed in continuous reassessment. We must act, because action is the mechanism for actually testing our assumptions and strategies. Second, reassessment can become redundant when successive generations of technical staff unwittingly fail to build on previous work. We may waste effort reinventing the same assessments without integrating new learning or refining our strategies. There is an opportunity cost to assessment in the form of reduced action.
For spatial reassessment to be part of a coherent adaptive effort requires we need to 1) develop the social infrastructure to remember and refine our strategies over time, and to support this, 2) make our assessments systematic, accessible, and flexible. This chapter focusses on the technical aspects of nimble reassessment, that will more likely to support the development of social infrastructure.
