Social and Legal Effects on Monitoring and Adaptive Management: A Case Study of National Forest Grazing Allotments, 1927–2007

Abstract

Monitoring is a critical component of adaptive management but often weak or missing in practice. We examined grazing allotment files to identify patterns in monitoring and management practices on the Coronado National Forest from 1927 to 2007, and conducted interviews with key informants to understand the mechanisms behind those patterns. Standardized, documented monitoring occurred on a near-annual basis on all allotments until 1978; ceased abruptly from 1978 to 1998; then resumed. Before 1978, monitoring frequently indicated excessive stocking, but reductions often did not occur. Interviews revealed that monitoring ceased for this reason, as agency employees turned to more informal methods in hopes of affecting management. Monitoring resumed in response to litigation by environmental groups. Curiously, more effective adaptive management of grazing allotments appears to have begun during the period when standardized monitoring was not occurring.

Keywords:

• adaptive management
• grazing allotments
• monitoring
• national forests
• rangelands

Acknowledgments

This research was funded in part by the Berkeley Institute for the Environment, the University of California–Berkeley Committee on Research, and the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation. We are grateful to Louise Fortmann for her support and comments on early drafts; to Paula Medlock of the Coronado National Forest for assistance with the grazing allotment files; to the Forest Service employees and grazing permittees who agreed to be interviewed; and to three anonymous reviewers for helpful comments.

Notes

Note that the decline in litigation may have had other causes as well. For instance, environmental plaintiffs may have decided for other reasons that litigation against the U.S. Forest Service grazing program in the Southwest was no longer a good strategic choice.

Budgets for range management on individual forests may have been cut or diverted to other activities, such as planning. But it is hard to determine whether these factors played a role on the CNF in the late 1970s because it was relatively easy, and common, for U.S. Forest Service officials to move funds between various programming accounts. Many activities could be characterized as fulfilling multiple objectives (e.g., a range improvement project might fall within range management, watershed protection, erosion control, or wildlife management), and supervisors or district rangers could reclassify an activity to maintain stable operations in the face of changing allocations of funds among different program areas (Sample 1990, 179–195).

Why higher level officials permitted monitoring to cease is a separate question, for which solid answers are elusive. The contemporaneous rise of intrusive judicial review, along with new federal laws that empowered environmental groups to challenge U.S. Forest Service decisions, may have made monitoring data into a potential threat to U.S. Forest Service autonomy (Biber 2011).