Wildlife management

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Wildlife management is the process of keeping certain wildlife populations at desirable levels determined by wildlife managers. Wildlife management is interdisciplinary, integrating science, politics, mathematics, imagination, and logic. It deals with protecting endangered and threatened species and subspecies and their habitats, as well as with non-threatened agricultural pests and game species. Aldo Leopold, one of the pioneers of wildlife management, defined it as "the art of making land produce sustained annual crops of wildlife."

In the United States, wildlife management practices are often implemented by a governmental agency to uphold a law, such as the Endangered Species Act of 1973. Many wildlife managers are employed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and by state governments. In the United Kingdom, wildlife management is often undertaken by privately employed gamekeepers on shooting estates.

Wildlife managers aim to use the best available science to balance the needs of wildlife with their perception of the needs of people. Wildlife management takes into consideration ecological principles such as carrying capacity of the habitat. Most wildlife management is concerned with the preservation and control of habitat, but other techniques such as reforestation, predator control techniques such as trapping, re-introduction of species or hunting may also be used to help manage "desirable" or "undesirable" species.

If a habitat is to be maintained, it must include natural disturbances that are normally present, such as wildfire and grazing by wild animals. Fire is a natural phenomenon that is required for many ecological processes, such as the clearing of dead plant materials and the germination of some types of plant seeds. For this reason, controlled burns are sometimes implemented in areas where wildfire is suppressed. Using controlled burns and other techniques of habitat manipulation, wildlife management aims to maintain a diversity of successional stages, from the first pioneer species to the full array resident in the climax community.

Wildlife management sometimes involves enhancing keystone resources in the habitat, such as sources of food, water, and protection. Some examples of artificial enhancements to keystone resources include water sources, nest boxes for cavity-nesting birds, and salt licks to provide minerals to animals.

There are two general types of wildlife management:

Manipulative management acts on a population, either changing its numbers by direct means or influencing numbers by the indirect means of altering food supply, habitat, density of predators, or prevalence of disease. This is appropriate when a population is to be harvested, or when it slides to an unacceptably low density or increases to an unacceptably high level. Such densities are inevitably the subjective view of the land owner, and may be disputed by animal welfare interests.
Custodial management is preventive or protective. The aim is to minimize external influences on the population and its habitat. It is appropriate in a national park where one of the stated goals is to protect ecological processes. It is also appropriate for conservation of a threatened species where the threat is of external origin rather than being intrinsic to the system.

1 Opposition
2 History
3 See also
4 Resources

[edit] Opposition

Wildlife management has been criticized by animal rights/animal welfare activists, environmentalists, and others who oppose hunting or other forms of direct human intervention into wild animal populations or habitats. Animal welfare critics criticse the cruelty involved in some forms of wildlife management. Ecological critics of wildlife management note that habitat manipulation and predator control are often used to increase populations of valuable game animals or birds (including introduced exotics) without regard to the ecological integrity of the habitat.

[edit] History

The profession of wildlife management was established in the United States in the interwar period (1920s-1930s) by Aldo Leopold and others who sought to transcend the purely restrictive policies of the previous generation of conservationists, such as anti-hunting activist William T. Hornaday. Leopold and his close associate Herbert Stoddard, who had both been trained in scientific forestry, argued that modern science and technology could be used to restore and improve wildlife habitat and thus produce abundant "crops" of ducks, deer, and other valued wild animals.

The institutional foundations of the profession of wildlife management were established in the 1930s, when Leopold was granted the first university professorship in wildlife management (1933, University of Wisconsin, Madison), when Leopold's textbook 'Game Management' was published (1933), when The Wildlife Society was founded, when the Journal of Wildlife Management began publishing, and when the first Cooperative Wildlife Research Units were established.

Wildlife management grew after World War II with the help of the GI Bill and a postwar boom in recreational hunting. Since the tumultuous 1970s, when animal rights activists and environmentalists began to challenge some aspects of wildlife management, the profession has been overshadowed by the rise of conservation biology. Although wildlife managers remain central to the implementation of the ESA and other wildlife conservation policies, Conservation biologists have shifted the focus of conservation away from wildlife management's concern with the protection and restoration of single species and toward the maintaine of ecosystems and biodiversity.