Management knowledge through wildlife research: A perspective

Wildlife management is a large, complex, decisionoriented science. Information from research is needed to improve the decisions made by managers. The scope of the research needed to inform typical decisions far exceeds even the most optimistic assumptions about the available funds, time, or human resources. An argument is made that while changes within the current management structures are unlikely, continuing classical experimental research alone will not meet the timely needs of the field or of citizens dependent on wildlife resources. Continuing in such a no-win game seems to be a misallocation of time and funds. Significant changes are called for and suggestions for such changes are made: discussions with people in other broadly defined fields with a similar problem, new sampling strategies, increased use of computer models, use of geobased information systems, use of game theory, nonspecies research grouping, new funding structures, and sharing of facilities and of teams of specialists.     

A multiobjective programming framework for integrating timber and wildlife management

This article describes a multiobjective programming (MOP) framework for integrating timber and wildlife management. The framework allows for the simultaneous consideration of timber and wildlife objectives. Management strategies are defined in terms of management regimes consisting of a time-identified and site-specific schedule of activities. A MOP model is described and demonstrated using an integrated planning example involving a forest managed for timber production and a variety of wildlife species.     

Improving our legacy: incorporation of adaptive management into state wildlife action plans

The loss of biodiversity is a mounting concern, but despite numerous attempts there are few large scale conservation efforts that have proven successful in reversing current declines. Given the challenge of biodiversity conservation, there is a need to develop strategic conservation plans that address species declines even with the inherent uncertainty in managing multiple species in complex environments. In 2002, the State Wildlife Grant program was initiated to fulfill this need, and while not explicitly outlined by Congress follows the fundamental premise of adaptive management, 'Learning by doing'. When action is necessary, but basic biological information and an understanding of appropriate management strategies are lacking, adaptive management enables managers to be proactive in spite of uncertainty. However, regardless of the strengths of adaptive management, the development of an effective adaptive management framework is challenging. In a review of 53 State Wildlife Action Plans, I found a keen awareness by planners that adaptive management was an effective method for addressing biodiversity conservation, but the development and incorporation of explicit adaptive management approaches within each plan remained elusive. Only ~25% of the plans included a framework for how adaptive management would be implemented at the project level within their state. There was, however, considerable support across plans for further development and implementation of adaptive management. By furthering the incorporation of adaptive management principles in conservation plans and explicitly outlining the decision making process, states will be poised to meet the pending challenges to biodiversity conservation.     

Organizational commitment to integrated and collaborative management: matching strategies to constraints

Integrated and collaborative approaches to environmental management are being advocated as a more appropriate and effective approach to decision-making. It is based on collaboration among a range of individuals and organizations that have a stake, role, or responsibility in management outcomes. However, researchers have found that implementation of this approach has encountered difficulties. This paper focuses on the role of organizations and their commitment to implementation. Based on case study and survey research in the United States and Australia, the author examines organizational constraints and the range of strategies used to secure commitment. It is argued that participants must more explicitly address the commitment issue and design implementation strategies that respond to organizational constraints.     

Striving for sustainable wildlife management: the case of Kilombero Game Controlled Area,Tanzania

The sustainability of wildlife resources in Africa is threatened by poaching for trophies and meat as well as changes in land use. In order to motivate local people for sustainable wildlife management, efforts to transfer decision-making power as well as benefits from central to local level have been made in several countries. Such efforts have not yet been seen in Kilombero Game Controlled Area, which is the area covered by the present study. The paper documents the importance of wildlife to local people, explores local people's perceptions on wildlife management and identifies constraints to sustainable wildlife management. A total of 177 household interviews in 5 villages and 129 interviews of pupils in schools have been conducted. The majority of pupils reported that their latest meal of meat was from a wild animal, and the most common species was buffalo. Apart from availability of cheap wildlife meat, advantages from living close to wildlife include the use of various parts of animals for, e.g. medical and ritual uses, and various plant products from wildlife habitats. Disadvantages include damages to crops, predation on livestock, and injuries to humans. The estimated loss of yield due to raiding by wildlife amounted to 21.9 and 47.8% of the harvest of rice and maize, respectively. Traditional wildlife management in Kilombero includes few rules to avoid resource depletion, because depletion has traditionally not been a problem due to low hunting technology and low human population. Government management includes strict rules, with hunting quotas as the main instrument, but the government has failed to enforce the rules. Ongoing discussions on new approaches to wildlife management like co-management and community-based management were largely unknown to the villagers in the area. Both poaching and agricultural expansion threaten the sustainability of Kilombero Game Controlled Area. It is suggested that transfers of decision-making power and benefits to local people is necessary in order to achieve sustainable management.     

Petroleum exploration in a resource management perspective

There is a need for positive interplay among the various actors in exploration. The licensees have an important role, but the host country's role in managing the assessment of the resources is equally important in promoting effective exploration. Selection of an appropriate concession policy is the main tool for the development of the host country's enterprising capacity both within and outside the petroleum sector. Some of the most important aspects of concession policy are reviewed, with reference to the Norwegian experience as an illustration. The development of infrastructure and institutional development in the country are major elements in resource management in as far as promoting a positive development in the country's enterprising capacity. It is therefore important that licensing as the cardinal element in exploration is implemented within a total resource management strategy.     

Participatory evaluation of collaborative and integrated water management: Insights from the field

The Maitland Watershed Partnerships (MWPs) is a multi-stakeholder forum established in 1999 in an agricultural watershed in Southwestern Ontario, Canada. This paper presents 10 lessons emerging from the participatory evaluation of the MWPs carried out in 2005. As suggested in the literature and highlighted by the experience of the MWPs, multi-stakeholder collaboration and integration is about learning how to cope with and take advantage from difference, diversity and divergence. Watershed partnerships are arenas in which different types of knowledges, diverse values and divergent sectoral perspectives, are confronted. In this context, inter-organizational leadership is essential to develop and sustain collaborative advantage among multiple public, private and civil society actors. According to the experience of the MWPs, however, embracing difference, diversity and divergence should go well beyond initial planning stages. Instead, pursuing compromise and agreement should also be at the forefront during the monitoring and evaluation stages. Negotiating indicators for monitoring and evaluation that can address water management both as a social process and a technical process is critical, as is making the distinction between partnership outputs and partnership outcomes.     

Factors influencing transboundary wildlife management in the North American ‘Crown of the Continent’

Jurisdictional boundaries and borders are rarely coincident with ecological systems. The long-term persistence of viable wildlife populations and habitats, especially for highly mobile and migratory species, is contingent upon effective management that transcends administrative boundaries. Although transboundary natural resource management has emerged as a topic of academic and professional discourse, implementation has been hampered by a host of barriers that include institutional, administrative, financial and contextual factors. The Crown Managers Partnership, a collaborative initiative of public land managers in the transboundary Rocky Mountains of Canada and the United States, is exploring the approaches to overcome these barriers. This paper reports on the results of interviews to identify the factors that influence the management of transboundary wildlife and provides a series of recommendations that are specific to the study area context, but are also transferable to other regions. Formalizing the existing partnership, exploring options for expanding participation in the partnership to include non-government interests, engaging third party facilitation, using non-traditional data sources, applying metapopulation ecology theory, and interdisciplinary problem solving are all elements recommended for improved transboundary management and of wildlife in the Crown of the Continent Ecosystem.     

A historical perspective of river basin management in the Pearl River Delta of China

Three innovations in water and soil conservancy technology in the Pearl River Delta of South China, i.e., dike building, land reclamation, and dike-pond systems, were examined from a historical perspective. They were found to best reflect local farmers' efforts to cope with the challenges of various water disasters and to build a harmonious relationship with the changed environment. These technologies were critical to the agricultural success and sustainability over the past 2000 years, and reflected local farmers' wisdom in balancing land use and environmental conservation. Imprudent use of a new agricultural technology could damage the environment, and could disturb the human-environment relationship, as evidenced by the more frequent flooding that followed inappropriate dike building and premature reclamation. It is suggested that as the urbanization and industrialization process in the delta region continues, the kind of thinking that made the water and soil conservancy sustainable needs to be incorporated into the design of similar technologies for water use and river basin management today.     

Valuing wildlife: a review of methods

The paper analyses the costs and benefits of conserving wildlife and reports part of a wider research project which aims to estimate the benefits of certain ecological types and habitats, and to compare the outcome of different techniques used to value wildlife. The authors outline a range of philosophical, technical and methodological problems in deriving cardinal measures of costs and benefits.     

Environmental planning and management: The need for an integrative perspective

Effective integration and implementation of environmental policies is directly related to the effectiveness of environmental management. Developing more effective environmental policy and programs requires coordinating the many factors related to environmental quality. The purpose of this paper is to point out the differences in perceptions and attributes of two operating groups in society: the technologists and the ecologists. Furthermore, an attempt is made to explain the need for effective environmental management and to suggest that only when such a role is fully institutionalized will decision makers have the impetus to take both the present and the future into consideration. Only by developing an understanding of the tools used by all groups working in the environmental arena will the environmental manager be able to provide both short- and longrange perspectives. By using these perspectives, the environmental manager will be able to mold environmental factors into operational policies and objectives.In conclusion, the systems analysis approach presented is the set of tools that can be used by the environmental manager to aid in bringing the two points of view closer together. The technologist, as well as the ecologist, will be required to work within a management system to more effectively and accurately define states of nature and assess alternatives in terms of primary, secondary, and higher-order consequences over both the short and long term.     

A riparian wildlife habitat evaluation scheme developed using GIS

Recent Italian laws mandate the consideration of environmental factors in local plans, especially at the provincial level of government. The plan for the province of Cremona in northern Italy illustrates the integration of the environment in provincial-level planning. The Cremona plan was developed through an ecological planning approach that occurred from 1994 to 1998. As part of this process, the planning team designed an environmental sustainability index. This index was integrated with an environmental capability analysis. To improve the quality of the Cremona landscape, the planning team developed an ecological network. This network seeks to weave together the natural areas of the province, especially by connecting provincial parks to regional river parks throughout Lombardy. The experience of the Cremona provincial plan has implications for environmental management elsewhere in Italy, Europe, and abroad.     

Problem-Framing: A perspective on environmental problem-solving

The specter of environmental calamity calls for the best efforts of an involved public. Ironically, the way people understand the issues all too often serves to discourage and frustrate rather than motivate them to action. This article draws from problem-solving perspectives offered by cognitive psychology and conflict management to examine a framework for thinking about environmental problems that promises to help rather than hinder efforts to address them. Problem-framing emphasizes focusing on the problem definition. Since how one defines a problem determines one's understanding of and approach to that problem, being able to redefine or reframe a problem and to explore the “problem space” can help broaden the range of alternatives and solutions examined. Problem-framing incorporates a cognitive perspective on how people respond to information. It explains why an emphasis on problem definition is not part of people's typical approach to problems. It recognizes the importance of structure and of having ways to organize that information on one's problem-solving effort. Finally, problem-framing draws on both cognitive psychology and conflict management for strategies to manage information and to create a problem-solving environment that not only encourages participation but can yield better approaches to our environmental problems.     

Coupling ecosystem science with management: A Great Lakes perspective from Green Bay,Lake Michigan,USA

Continued resource degradation in various areas of the Great Lakes has led to doubts of the adequacy of conventional science and management approaches. The need for a more holistic approach, identified as an ecosystem approach, appears now to be more widely accepted although progress with implementation is slow. We argue here that ecosystem science is an integral part of an ecosystem approach and is a prerequisite to effective management planning.One of the problems of implementing an ecosystem approach is forging the link between ecosystem based research and management. For Green Bay, Wisconsin, USA, certain structural and functional qualities of the ecosystem have been used to define operational guides and to formulate management objectives. These objectives are being utilized in the development of a remedial action plan for Green Bay.Deceased 5 February 1986.     

Economic amenity values of wildlife: Six case studies in Pennsylvania

The travel clost method (TCM) and contingent valuation method (CVM) were used to evaluate the economic value of six different ecotourism activities involving observation of wildlife in Pennsylvania. The six activities were: catch-and-release trout fishing; catch-and-release trout fishing with fly-fishing equipment; viewing waterfowl; watching elk; observing migration flights of raptors; and seeing live wildlife in an environmental education setting. TCM results provided significant statistical relationships between level of use and travel costs for the two types of trout fishing activities. CVM provided estimates of consumer surplus for the other four sites. The consumers' surplus value (1988 dollars) of all six activities to participants amounted to a total of more than $1.28 million annually—twice the total out-of-pocket expenditures of approximately $640,000 spent to visit the sites. The economic amenity values of the six activities compare favorably with similarly derived values in other studies for hunting, fishing, hiking, and backpacking in dispersed recreation environments and wilderness areas in western states.     

The challenges and implications of collaborative management on a river basin scale

Collaboration has rapidly become the dominant paradigm in natural resource management, but there are many dilemmas about how it is applied effectively. In southwest Oregon, agencies, watershed councils and other stakeholders are developing a river basin approach to assess ecological health and set priorities for restoration. An analysis of this process reveals considerable progress in this innovative effort and it reveals several implications for collaboration at a regional scale, including: tensions between technical complexity and open participation, difficulties with information exchange for joint management, the relationships between technical issues and policy issues, the role of regional policy in supporting collaborative efforts, and the importance of institutional arrangements.