Predator Management at the Landscape Scale: The Delta Experience
Session Chair - Frank Rohwer, Delta Waterfowl Foundation & Louisiana State University
Not so long ago, researchers focused on wildlife ecology versus those focused on wildlife management regularly failed to acknowledge the literature of the other, perhaps because of deeply-rooted philosophical differences in their goals. The former group focused on questions about why populations fluctuated, whereas the latter group was more concerned with methods to manipulate populations. More recently, as circumstances have coached a closer relationship between “basic” research and “applied” research and management, it has become more generally appreciated that each can and should be profitably informed by the other. Increasingly, management actions, such as harvest regulation setting, habitat alterations, or disease control, are viewed as opportunities to partner with researchers to resolve key uncertainties both about the efficacy of management activities, and how results can inform basic theory. As an example, Delta Waterfowl Foundation undertook for the last decade, at unprecedented scales of space and replicate treatments and controls, an adaptive predator management program in North Dakota and other parts of the prairie pothole region. In conjunction, 26 graduate students from 12 universities undertook research on control and predator management sites where populations of mammalian meso-predators of duck nests were reduced to explore the behavioral, population, and community ecology of ducks and other species. This session will review and highlight the main results of studies of duck settling behavior, breeding population size and age structure, nest success, duckling survival, and movements of ducks, as well as studies of other component species of complex prairie food webs: shorebirds, grouse, small mammals, and raptors.
Plenary 4. Predator Management at the Landscape Scale: The Delta Experience
Oral Presentations - Thursday morning, 20 August 2009
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