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Insufficient funding is a major impediment to conservation efforts around the world. In the United States, a decline in hunting participation threatens sustainability of the “user‐pay, public benefit” model that has supported wildlife conservation for nearly 100 years, forcing wildlife management agencies to contemplate alternative funding strategies. We investigated support for potential funding options among diverse college students, a rapidly expanding and politically active voting bloc with a potentially powerful influence on the future of conservation. From 2018 to 2020, we surveyed 17,203 undergraduate students at public universities across 22 states. Students preferred innovative approaches to conservation funding, with 72% supporting funding derived from industry sources (e.g., natural resource extraction companies), 63% supporting state sources (e.g., general sales tax), and 43% supporting conventional user‐based sources such as license fees and excise taxes associated with outdoor recreation activities (e.g., hunting). Findings emphasize the need to broaden the base of support for conservation funding and highlight the importance of considering the preferences and perspectives of young adults and other diverse beneficiaries of wildlife conservation.

We present a case study from New York, USA, of the use of structured decision making (SDM) to identify fall turkey harvest regulations that best meet stakeholder objectives, in light of recent apparent declines in abundance of wild turkeys in the northeastern United States. We used the SDM framework to incorporate the multiple objectives associated with turkey hunting, stakeholder desires, and region-specific ecological and environmental factors that could influence fall harvest. We identified a set of 4 fall harvest regulations, composed of different season lengths and bag limits, and evaluated their relative achievement of the objectives. We used a stochastic turkey population model, statistical modeling, and expert elicitation to evaluate the consequences of each harvest regulation on each of the objectives. We conducted a statewide mail survey of fall turkey hunters in New York to gather the necessary information to evaluate tradeoffs among multiple objectives associated with hunter satisfaction. The optimal fall harvest regulation was a 2-week season and allowed for the harvest of 1 bird/hunter. This regulation was the most conservative of those evaluated, reflecting the concerns about recent declines in turkey abundance among agency wildlife biologists and the hunting public. Depending on the region of the state, the 2-week, 1-bird regulation was predicted to result in 7–32% more turkeys on the landscape after 5 years. The SDM process provided a transparent framework for setting fall turkey harvest regulations and reduced potential stakeholder conflict by explicitly taking the multiple objectives of different stakeholder groups into account. © 2017 The Wildlife Society.

Wildlife agencies liberalize hunting seasons and bag limits to reduce white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus) density in peri-urban areas, often without knowing how hunters or private landowners will respond. To reduce deer density effectively, such programs must attract 1) hunters who are willing and able to harvest antlerless deer and 2) private landowners who are willing to permit needed hunter access. We assessed these conditions for a program in New York State, USA, that permitted participants to harvest 2 antlerless deer/day, over a 96-day period, within a 20,530-ha management unit. A mail survey (n = 683; 65% response) documented that participating hunters were interested in taking multiple antlerless deer, but few were able to do so. Moreover, the participant drop-out rate was high between program years 1 and 2, primarily because many hunters could not gain access to land and fulfill their expectations about seeing and harvesting deer. Telephone interviews with a random sample of 100 (from a population of 4 ha revealed that, despite their concerns about negative impacts of deer, few area landowners allowed additional hunters on their lands, often citing concerns about 1) interference with personal or family hunting activities or 2) the behavior of unknown hunters. We concluded that the program only minimally increased antlerless deer harvest, due in large part to limits on hunter access. Wildlife agencies need to understand hunters and landowners to create conditions necessary for local hunting programs to be effective tools to manage peri-urban deer populations. © 2016 The Wildlife Society.

Fish and wildlife harvest management at large spatial scales often involves making complex decisions with multiple objectives and difficult tradeoffs, population demographics that vary spatially, competing stakeholder values, and uncertainties that might affect management decisions. Structured decision making (SDM) provides a formal decision analytic framework for evaluating difficult decisions by breaking decisions into component parts and separating the values of stakeholders from the scientific evaluation of management actions and uncertainty. The result is a rigorous, transparent, and values‐driven process. This decision‐aiding process provides the decision maker with a more complete understanding of the problem and the effects of potential management actions on stakeholder values, as well as how key uncertainties can affect the decision. We use a case study to illustrate how SDM can be used as a decision‐aiding tool for management decision making at large scales. We evaluated alternative white‐tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus) buck‐harvest regulations in New York designed to reduce harvest of yearling bucks, taking into consideration the values of the state wildlife agency responsible for managing deer, as well as deer hunters. We incorporated tradeoffs about social, ecological, and economic management concerns throughout the state. Based on the outcomes of predictive models, expert elicitation, and hunter surveys, the SDM process identified management alternatives that optimized competing objectives. The SDM process provided biologists and managers insight about aspects of the buck‐harvest decision that helped them adopt a management strategy most compatible with diverse hunter values and management concerns.

In many states, case law, statutes, or constitutions establish a “public trust in wildlife,” a derivative of the public trust doctrine. Although interpretation differs across jurisdictions, the underlying principle of wildlife as a public trust resource, explicitly expressed or not, carries with it broad obligations and standards of trust administration by government to ensure benefits of wildlife are available to all citizens, present and future. The standards for execution of responsibilities by trustees (elected officials or their appointees, such as commissions) and trust managers (e.g., wildlife professionals working for state wildlife agencies) require understanding beneficiaries' varied interests in the wildlife resource, which in turn requires effective public input and involvement, following the precepts of good governance, such as inclusiveness, openness, fairness, transparency, and accountability. Managing wildlife resources as public trust assets entails providing sustainable net benefits from the existence of wildlife and its co-existence with humans. Wildlife managers need an approach to wildlife management that is philosophically consistent with the benefits-production focus of trust administration. We explain that impacts management is such an approach, essentially tailor-made for fulfilling trust-management responsibilities because of its focus on diverse, stakeholder-value-defined outcomes (desired impacts) and its reliance on stakeholders' input for identifying and weighing competing outcomes desired by them. Impacts management is a wildlife resource management approach for providing sustainable, highly relevant public trust administration. © 2013 The Wildlife Society.

A set of interrelated social and environmental changes have accelerated the transmission of wildlife-associated infectious diseases around the world. Emerging infectious disease (EID) events take a heavy toll on human health and have significant global economic impacts. In the risk-averse society of the United States, EID events associated with wildlife, particularly zoonoses, have potential to diminish the value of wildlife for society, depress interest in wildlife-related activities and decrease support for wildlife conservation. Messages about wildlife-associated zoonotic diseases should promote human and animal health, while avoiding development of exaggerated risk perceptions that can have deleterious effects on participation in wildlife-related outdoor activities or support for wildlife conservation. We outline 3 categories of negative consequences arising from current communication conditions with respect to zoonoses. We then describe key communication links that the wildlife profession needs to address to obviate these consequences. Finally, we propose a number of actions the wildlife professional community can take to improve communication about zoonotic diseases. In this regard, we discuss the One Health concept and other opportunities for interdisciplinary collaboration on communication between wildlife health, wildlife management, and public health professionals. We conclude that a foundation for effective communication about zoonotic diseases needs to be built on stronger interdisciplinary collaboration between the wildlife profession and the public health profession. Starting from a solid foundation of collaboration among wildlife veterinarians and wildlife biologists and managers, wildlife professionals should build strong bridges with the public health profession. We suggest that the latter can be spanned by wildlife veterinarians. © 2011 The Wildlife Society.

In Massachusetts, USA, both human and beaver (Castor canadensis) population levels are increasing, beaver damage complaints are escalating, and beaver management options are restricted by the 1996 Wildlife Protection Act. We looked at the public's norms toward beavers in Massachusetts. In 2002 we sent a mail-back questionnaire to a random sample of 5,563 residents in 3 geographic regions in Massachusetts and to residents who submitted a beaver complaint to Massachusetts Division of Fisheries and Wildlife (MassWildlife) in 1999–2000 (47.3% overall response rate). Respondents supported some form of beaver management. As severity of beaver damage was perceived to increase, respondents were more willing to accept lethal management and control of beavers. These results emphasize the importance of how tolerance and acceptability of wildlife are influenced by the type of activity the animal is engaged in, the type of management action that is proposed, the positive or negative perception of a species in...

As stakeholder attitudes, values, and management preferences become increasingly diverse, managing human-wildlife conflicts will become more difficult. This challenge is especially evident in Massachusetts, USA, where furbearer management has been constrained by passage of a ballot initiative that outlawed use of foothold and body-gripping traps except in specific instances involving threats to human health or safety. Without regulated trapping, beaver (Castor canadensis) populations and damage attributed to them have increased. To develop an understanding of public attitudes regarding beaver-related management issues, we surveyed a random sample of Massachusetts residents in the spring of 2002 within 3 geographic regions where beaver are prevalent, as well as all individuals who submitted a beaver-related complaint to the Massachusetts Division of Fisheries and Wildlife in 1999 and 2000. We found that respondents held generally positive attitudes toward beaver. Respondents who experienced beaver-related problems tended to have less favorable or negative attitudes toward beaver than people who did not experience beaver damage. Attitudes toward beaver became increasingly negative as the severity of damage experienced by people increased. We believe continued public support for wildlife conservation will require implementation of strategies that are responsive to changing attitudes of an urban population and within social-acceptance and biological carrying capacities.

Adaptive wildlife management seeks to improve the integration of science and management by focusing decision-making on hypothesis-testing and structuring management actions as field experiments. Since the early 1990s, adaptive resource management (ARM) has advocated enhancing scientific rigor in evaluating management actions chosen to achieve “enabling objectives” typically directed at wildlife habitat or population characteristics. More recently, the concept of adaptive impact management (AIM) has emphasized a need to articulate “fundamental objectives” in terms of wildlife-related impacts to be managed. Adaptive impact management seeks to clarify why management is undertaken in a particular situation. Understanding the “why” question is viewed in AIM as a prerequisite for establishing enabling objectives, whether related to changes in wildlife habitats and populations or to human beliefs and behaviors. This article describes practical aspects of AIM by exploring relationships between AIM and ARM within a comprehensive model of decision-making for wildlife management. Adaptive impact management clarifies and differentiates fundamental objectives (i.e., wildlife-related impacts to be modified) and enabling objectives (i.e., conditions that affect levels of impacts), whereas ARM reduces uncertainty about how to achieve enabling objectives and seeks an optimal management alternative through hypothesis-testing. The 2 concepts make different contributions to development of management hypotheses about alternative actions and policies and should be nested for optimal application to comprehensive wildlife management. Considered in the context of the entire management process, AIM and ARM are complementary ideas contributing to adaptive wildlife management.

Increasing human-wildlife interactions in urban and suburban environments have created new challenges for management agencies as residents seek to become more involved in the decision-making process. White-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus) management may best illustrate both the challenges and the opportunities that exist in human-dominated environments. In these settings wildlife managers are increasingly being expected to engage stakeholders in identifying objectives and implementing management actions tailored to local needs and circumstances. We argue that successful management in these environments is closely related to several attributes of the stakeholder involvement process. Thus, additional theoretical developments and more empirical research will be needed to help managers facilitate community-based decision-making processes that are truly collaborative. We believe the next frontier for continued advancement and increased community and agency satisfaction with suburban deer management is improving local knowledge and leadership. We contend this can best be done through comprehensive intervention programs. In this paper we draw on the body of wildlife agency collaborative management process research to identify and describe the role of knowledge and local leadership in collaboration.