Optimal policy recommendations from natural resource management models can involve fast-changing management interventions. Actual policies often change more gradually, potentially reflecting costs associated with policy adjustment. We examine how including policy adjustment costs changes policy recommendations in models of fishery management. Specifically, we examine cases where policy adjustment costs increase at an increasing rate with the rate of change of fishing effort levels. We examine how accounting for these costs changes optimal management strategies in static and time-varying environments. Increasing policy adjustment costs results in optimal approach paths to stationary optimal solutions that are more gradual but that rely on oscillatory convergence. In time-varying environments, including policy adjustment costs smoothes optimal management recommendations, resulting in decreased variation in effort levels on the stationary part of the optimal solution, but increased variation in optimal stock sizes. We conclude that accounting for policy adjustment costs in this way leads to management recommendations that in some ways would be simpler for managers to implement (more gradual approach paths), but in other ways more challenging (oscillatory convergence) and that can affect where environmental variability is expressed in model predictions (stock sizes versus effort levels) while not suppressing this variability altogether.

Ecological systems are dynamic and policies to manage them need to respond to that variation. However, policy adjustments will sometimes be costly, which means that fine-tuning a policy to track variability in the environment very tightly will only sometimes be worthwhile. We use a classic fisheries management problem, how to manage a stochastically varying population using annually varying quotas in order to maximize profit, to examine how costs of policy adjustment change optimal management recommendations. Costs of policy adjustment (changes in fishing quotas through time) could take different forms. For example, these costs may respond to the size of the change being implemented, or there could be a fixed cost any time a quota change is made. We show how different forms of policy costs have contrasting implications for optimal policies. Though it is frequently assumed that costs to adjusting policies will dampen variation in the policy, we show that certain cost structures can actually increase variation through time. We further show that failing to account for adjustment costs has a consistently worse economic impact than would assuming these costs are present when they are not.

Open space areas protected by local communities may augment larger scale preservation efforts and may offer overlooked benefits to biodiversity conservation provided they are in suitable ecological condition. We examine protected areas established by local communities through ballot initiatives, a form of direct democracy, in California, USA. We compare ecological conditions of wooded habitats on local ballot protected sites and on sites protected by a state-level conservation agency. Collectively, we found few differences in ecological conditions on each protected area type. Ballot sites had greater invasive understory cover and larger trees. Community dissimilarity patterns suggested ballot sites protect a complementary set of tree species to those on state lands. Overall, geographic characteristics influenced onsite conditions more than details of how sites were protected. Thus, community-driven conservation efforts contribute to protected area networks by augmenting protection of some species while providing at least some protection to others that might otherwise be missed.