Statistical Methods for Adaptive Management Studies

As adaptive management becomes more widely recognized as a foundation element of good land stewardship, many resource professionals are attempting to extend its theories and principles into common practice. They wish to conduct powerful management experiments, to monitor the outcomes effectively and efficiently, and to use the resulting data to make reliable inferences for future decisions. Most managers, however, have little formal training in the application of experimental design and statistics to the problems that they want to address through adaptive management. This book sets the stage for the in-depth discussions of key aspects of statistics in adaptive management. It includes a working definition of adaptive management, demonstrates the value of the application of adaptive management to forestry issues, and explains some of the differences between research studies and adaptive management techniques.