The challenge is to implement flexible and dynamic management approaches that integrate conservation goals with economic and social interests. In 1993, the President's Council on Environmental Quality produced a blueprint for biodiversity protection on private lands. It examines a few of the critical issues in resource management and highlights the importance of addressing entire ecosystems over long periods of time rather than looking only at small pieces of the puzzle on a short-term basis. Two specific, integrated, dynamic management approaches that have found widespread support in recent years are ecosystem management and adaptive management. Ecosystem management has emerged as an important concept among most federal agencies and many large private land managers.
Sustainability is an essential element and precondition.
The biological diversity, evolutionary potential, and productive capability of the system must be maintained. Nels and Barrett provide an example of this new, integrated approach as it is being implemented in the Connecticut River Tidelands ecosystem. The goal of the Tidelands Program is to protect the marsh and river ecosystem, including rare species and communities, water-quality, and ecological processes. It includes land protection, biological monitoring and management, research, water quality monitoring and pollution control, restoration, government relations, and outreach. A similar approach is used in the Klamath Basin on the Oregon-California border.