In the Anthropocene, human influence over wildlife and wild places is growing in intensity and speed. Wildlife and wild places are changing, and those changes feedback to affect humans in complex and sometimes counterintuitive ways. This feedback is most acute to those land managers who manage specific landscapes for specific wildlife, and it is critical that wildlife professionals develop a better understanding of changing wild systems. What makes systems wild, and how can wildness be protected or even cultivated in a conservation context? Even more important than keeping wildlife wild is keeping the feedback wild and understanding what makes a social-ecological system more wild or less wild. In this dissertation I build a model of an adaptive social-ecological system, and I apply it to the challenge of managing transforming oak ecosystems on state game areas in southern Michigan. First, I interviewed land managers within the Michigan Department of Natural Resources and the Michigan Natural Features Inventory to develop a detailed and nuanced qualitative assessment of oak management and barriers to prescribed fire use on state lands in southern Michigan. From these interviews I developed a series of hypotheses in the form of simple causal loop diagrams, a common approach in systems dynamics modeling. These models provide four explanations for the persistent pattern of under-use of prescribed fire to manage oaks and savannas in southern Michigan. Next, I developed an agent-based model of land managers using prescribed fire to manage oak ecosystems in a changing climate. The model illustrates how social interactions among agents stimulates some agents to adapt and blocks others from adapting to changes in the seasonal pattern of safe prescribed fire weather. Over time the number of burn days decreased because climate change increased danger of wildfire, adding another barrier to restoration of oak ecosystems. I synthesized observations from the first two chapters with properties of complex adaptive systems to develop a description of wildness in social-ecological systems. In humid climates, like Michigan and much of the eastern United States, oak systems depend on human-mediated disturbance, and as such these systems are a useful example of an interdependent and interacting social-ecological system. Important findings from this research include 1) the social system that causes fire exclusion is more complex than a lack of value or understanding of oak ecosystems by land managers, 2) both wet and dry regional climate models predict future fire weather than is poorer for prescribed fire because it will be too hot and dry to use fire safely, and 3) describing social-ecological systems as self-organizing provides a new paradigm to describe wildness of systems that include humans. Managing complex systems in the Anthropocene de-emphasizes prediction and control and emphasizes respect and interactive adaptation.
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