The DoD manages a diversity of ecosystems and numerous listed and at-risk species. Effective and sustainable management of these resources supports both military readiness and stewardship needs. DoD must manage within the context of:
(1) future climate change, and associated phenomena such as sea level rise;
(2) continued alteration of natural disturbance regimes such as fire;
(3) presence of non-native invasive species; and
(4) continued loss and fragmentation of habitat.
Social, regulatory, and management frameworks that focus strictly on individual listed species or environments that assume static ranges of variability (i.e., assumptions of stationarity) potentially represent soon to be outdated contexts for conservation on military and other lands that are themselves subject at times to dynamic land use. If the rapid and profound future ecological changes anticipated by climate scientists and ecologists manifest, the current species-specific and narrowly defined approaches to maintenance of required habitat are likely to require ever-increasing resource inputs (financial and otherwise) to manage the response of species and ecosystems subject to new climate regimes, disturbance regimes, and often continued loss and degradation of habitat. Although these changes have potential consequences for currently listed species, more importantly they portend significant uncertainties for how ecosystems in general and their full complement of species and services may be affected. Understanding how different ecosystems and individual species may respond—what makes some resilient and others not— may provide important insights for conservation and management. Such insights are important for sustaining DoD military readiness and stewardship responsibilities.
New conceptual paradigms or frameworks for managing and conserving ecosystems, and at times focal species of interest, are needed to confront the reality of a non-stationary and at times no-analogue future and the potentially inherent conflicts with maintaining listed and at-risk species habitat that may or may not be possible with current management paradigms under future climate change scenarios, disturbance regimes, and land use. At ecological community and 2 3 landscape scales, new social, regulatory, and management frameworks—informed by advances in community ecology and regime shift theory and an understanding of ecosystem properties useful and meaningful for assessing and guiding management—must account for these new potential and plausible futures. This SON seeks to advance the theoretical and applied basis for informing these new paradigms of managing species and ecosystems in a non-stationary world through innovative and forward-looking research.