ABSTRACT

Management actions provide opportunities to evaluate the accuracy of the causal assessment and the underlying understanding of ecological and physiological processes. In this way, assessments of their outcomes can inform and improve future actions, future causal assessments, and the knowledge base of ecological causal processes. The outcome of management actions can be used to provide feedback to causal assessment only if there are strong linkages between the causal assessment, the selection of a management action, and the assessment of the action’s success. For this reason, this chapter begins by describing an ideal sequence of activities and how they are linked together. It then discusses how causal assessments can contribute to the evaluation of management options and the evaluation of the outcomes of actions. Finally, the chapter discusses how the knowledge gained from the sequence of assessments can be synthesized and communicated to improve the scientific basis for making environmental decisions.