File:Cereghino 2014 DRAFT Integrated Nearshore Assessment.docx

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Cereghino, P. 2014. Moving towards nimble spatial reassessment. Prepared by NOAA Restoration Center for Puget Sound Partnership.

Introduction

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.