Key Concept: Sustainable Stewardship

Ecological sustainability is the restoration and maintenance of the diversity and functioning of natural ecosystems and the ecosystem services they provide for future generations, using methods that maximize feasibility and the likelihood of success over the long term. The idea of sustainable stewardship is for stewardship actions to make progress towards identified goals in a way that is feasible within the constraints of available resources and environmental conditions. Feasibility is the key to achieving desired conditions and maintaining high standards of ecosystem quality over the long term. Sustainability also depends on choosing methods of active stewardship that make progress on resolving difficult issues, leading to decreased active management needs over time. There are many challenges in the sustainable stewardship of natural areas. Funding, availability of labor, competing needs, and seasonality can all affect stewardship sustainability.

Developing a stewardship plan helps to organize the thinking, formulate the strategies, and define the desired outcomes for carrying out various stewardship actions. It is often easy to establish a goal and desired outcome (e.g., elimination of an invasive plant species), but achieving the goal may be much less straightforward. There is always a tension between the ideal and the possible. Feasibility, capacity, available resources, and the ability to follow through with any action are all factors that need to be considered when determining if a given action is doable long-term and a desired state can be sustained.

When developing a stewardship plan, each goal should be scrutinized to understand what kind of effort, funding, and capacity will be needed to effectively achieve or make continual progress toward achieving the goal. Categorizing a goal as either short-term or long-term can help determine what action is needed and for how long. For many natural areas managers, long-term and ongoing tasks and goals (e.g., monitoring, the adaptive management cycle) can be particularly challenging with the relatively short time windows associated with grant funding. It is tempting to begin a project and hope that more funding or capacity will be found, and that is often how work proceeds. Sometimes there is little choice, and sometimes the goals evolve to conform to what is possible. Establishing a realistic goal and being fully cognizant of what it may mean to sustain progress toward that goal is crucial to everything downstream in the planning process. Unrealistic or unsustainable goals can result in not just disappointing outcomes, but also in the use of funding and capacity that could have been much more effectively used somewhere else.

Some key questions that can bring sustainability to the forefront when developing goals and strategies are:

• What are we trying to achieve and why?
• If we do not act, what might the result be and is it unacceptable?
• Is it a long-term or short-term goal (and required effort)?
• What is the effort needed to achieve or maintain progress in reaching the goal?
• Are there resources available now and into the foreseeable future that will allow progress to be made?
• Is there a champion for the effort or an institutional position or structure that will provide continuity year by year in making progress toward the goal?

Answering these questions may help to give perspective and decide if any given stewardship effort is sustainable or, if given the right resources, can become sustainable.