Ecosystem management

Ecosystem management is an approach to natural resource management that aims to ensure the long-term sustainability and persistence of an ecosystem's function and services while meeting socioeconomic, political, and cultural needs.^[1][2][3] Although indigenous communities have employed sustainable ecosystem management approaches implicitly for millennia, ecosystem management emerged explicitly as a formal concept in the 1990s from a growing appreciation of the complexity of ecosystems and of humans' reliance and influence on natural systems (e.g., disturbance and ecological resilience).^[4][5]

Building upon traditional natural resource management, ecosystem management integrates ecological, socioeconomic, and institutional knowledge and priorities through diverse stakeholder participation.^[6] In contrast to command and control approaches to natural resource management, which often lead to declines in ecological resilience, ecosystem management is a holistic, adaptive method for evaluating and achieving resilience and sustainability. As such, implementation is context-dependent and may take a number of forms including adaptive management, strategic management, and landscape-scale conservation.^[1][3][7]