Water Stewardship Information Sources

Citation Price, K, Roburn, A and Mackinnon, A. 2009. Ecosystem-management in the Great Bear Rainforest. Forest Ecology and Management 258:495-503.
Organization FLNRO
URL http://web.uvic.ca/~starzom/EBM_GBR2009.pdf
Abstract/Description or Keywords Ecosystem-based management is the management system being applied to 6.4 million hectares of the
coast of British Columbia, Canada, an area referred to as the Great Bear Rainforest. This approach,
intended to manage for ecosystem integrity and community wellbeing, is similar in many respects to
ecosystem management approaches elsewhere. However, several novel elements are involved in
application of ecosystem-based management on British Columbia’s coast: shifts in power that have led to
increased aboriginal control and the formation of coalitions between groups that were formerly in
opposition; development of explicit models relating management strategies to land-use objectives and
separating knowledge from values; use of ecological thresholds and natural variability to establish
management targets. Current management is based on transitional targets that differ from science-based
targets. Many challenges remain in moving to full implementation of ecosystem-based management,
including the difficulties involved in moving from one management model to a fundamentally different
one, limited resources for implementation, dealing with complex systems, the lack of freely available
multi-disciplinary data, and the difficulty of bringing concepts of uncertainty and risk into public policy
discussions in a transparent manner.
Information Type article
Regional Watershed Central Coast
Sub-watershed if known
Aquifer #
Comments
Project status complete
Contact Name Andy MacKinnon
Contact Email [email protected]