State meeting guidance document.doc

To: LMVJV Waterfowl Working Group

From: John Tirpak

Date: 1 October 2008

Re: State meeting guidance document

The art of wildlife management is the science of making decisions with imperfect information. In waterfowl management, our information is imperfect due to gaps in our knowledge, our technical limitations, and the inherent variability of the systems we are trying to manage. We can not use these challenges as excuses. Relative to other segments of the wildlife management community, waterfowl management suffers from an “embarrassment of riches” when it comes to what we do know about the habitats and needs of the species we are managing. And the simple truth is the world is stochastic and not deterministic – despite our strongest desires for it not to be so. Thus, we are forced to proceed in our management with a certain amount of imperfect information and its associated discomfort.

At the last meeting of the Waterfowl Working Group, we recognized these realities and embarked on a path that would explicitly force us to confront these issues head-on. This has been a necessary step in the maturation of our thinking, and our failure to recognize this sooner is the likely culprit for our recent lack of progress on the allocation issue.

At the very outset of our meeting in Dumas, there was a general consensusamong us that a transparent, defensible, and replicable process for allocating waterfowl foraging habitat objectives among habitat sources (naturally flooded, public managed, and private managed lands) was neededbut did not currently exist. Although data from DU’s Waterfowl Habitat Monitoring Program were available to help inform the development of an allocation process that met these criteria, our efforts to use these data toestablish an allocation process at this meeting were hampered by the uncertainties associated not only with the data but the habitat sources themselves. Thus, we spent considerable time identifying the suite of issues associated with the gaps in our knowledge, our technical limitations, and the natural variability of our system.

Armed with this list, it was clear that there was also significant uncertainty in our ability to either assess or predict the amount of foraging resources (i.e., DEDs) that could actually be provided by any particular habitat source in any given year. Thus, we concluded that any process that allocated habitat objectives among sources to a single fixed point (e.g., 20% naturally flooded, 40% public managed, and 40% private managed lands) was fatally flawed. Instead, we surmised that the allocation process needed to identify the range of values within which habitat sources would be managed to meet waterfowl foraging habitat objectives in light of this imperfect information.

Recognizing the inherent differences among states in terms of ecological systems, the specific ranges of these values are likely to differ among states. Therefore, it was decided that each state waterfowl biologist would host a meeting with the other waterfowl habitat stakeholders within their state (e.g., national wildlife refuge managers, Ducks Unlimited staff) to identify these ranges for each habitat source. The desire to have a transparent, defensible, and replicable process requires that the assumptions underlying the establishment of these bounds be clearly articulated. The LMVJV Office, at the request of the group, has prepared the following documents to facilitate this process:

  1. An Excel file (DEDs_StateTables.xls) containing a table depicting state-specific DED values provided by each habitat type for each time period as reported in DU’s Waterfowl Habitat Monitoring Program. This file also provides DED objectives, current allocation values, and a “calculator” for naturally flooded and managed habitats.
  2. Bar graphs (DEDs_StateGraphs.ppt) depicting the tabular data in DEDs_StateTables.xls
  3. A Word file (WWG_AllocationIssues.doc) documenting the issues and concerns identified for assessing and predicting the amount of foraging habitat provided by each habitat source. With these issues identified and documented, we can now ask the harder questions:
  1. How much uncertainty and variability is associated with each of these issues?
  2. How much uncertainty and variability am I comfortable operating under?
  3. What are the consequences of being wrong?

By examining these questions for each of the issues, we will be able to identify those pieces of information that are critically holding us back and which pieces of information are valuable but not vital to the efficacy our management decisions. Documenting both the assumptions that answer these questions and the logic behind those assumptions for each of these issues will allow us to progress further and faster than we have to this point and is a critical step to establishing a transparent, defensible, and replicable allocation process.

  1. The June 2007 Waterfowl Working Group report to the LMVJV Management Board. This report has multiple appendices including the draft decision rule process, the draft allocation tables from the application of the decision rules, numerous tables outlining results of DU’s Waterfowl Habitat Monitoring Program analysis.

Without trying to constrain thinking, the LMVJV Office offers two suggestions for beginning the discussion. First, an examination of the extreme options for each habitat source may help define the outer boundaries. What are the implications of relying exclusively on or completely ignoring each habitat source for achieving habitat objectives? Second, an examination of the tables from DU’s Waterfowl Habitat Monitoring Program assessment may be useful. In particular, the DED tables and graphs mentioned above and the assessments of DED capabilities on public managed lands (Table 1 in the Waterfowl Working Group report) would provide some insight into realistic expectations for these habitat sources in terms of DED valuations both inter- and intra-annually. In looking at these tables, note that the winter of 1999-2000 was very dry and the winter of 2004-05 was very wet across the MAV. Also note that habitat assessments were made for 3 time periods during the winter of 2001-2002.

After the meeting, the state waterfowl biologist will provide John Tirpak the following items (due 1 December 2008):

  1. A list of participants in the state meeting
  2. A specific range of values representing the upper and lower bounds for each habitat source
  3. Naturally flooded lands
  4. Public managed lands
  5. Private managed lands
  6. A list of explicit assumptions associated with derivation of these bounds
  7. The WWG_AllocationIssues.doc provides a framework for identifying these assumptions
  8. The answers to the following questions relative to the issues identified in the WWG_AllocationIssues.doc:
  9. How much uncertainty and variability is associated with each of these issues?
  10. How much uncertainty and variability am I comfortable operating under?
  11. What are the consequences of being wrong?

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