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>>JIM: I had the pleasure over the last three years of leading the revision
of the North American Waterfowl Management Plan on behalf of the plan committee.
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>> We really took pains to get extensive consultations from the waterfowl
management community to get feedback and what they thought was important
for the future waterfowl management and where this plan should go in the future.
We undertook a series of thirteen different workshops
all over the U.S. and Canada. We had great participation, great energy and
we really had a lot of valuable information that fed back into that plan when it
came time to revise it.
Seven recommendations emerged in the North American Plan revision;
three of those are especially important and relevant in in the Action Plan
and really need to be addressed in the couple years ahead of us.
One is populations and habitat and the need to have healthy populations
linked with sustainable habitat conservation.
Two, has to do with people and the need to bring into our fold
the public at large so they can support our conservation work,
but bring back and kinda build back our hunter support base,
which has always been foundational to our work.
Three, has to do with integrating the different streams of Waterfowl
Management so we're effective and efficient and relevant going forward.
With regards to populations and habitat, the Joint Ventures have always focused
on habitat conservation,
and now the recommendation is to go back and look at the nature of the habitat
that's been conserved. Is it secure for for the long term?
Is it enough to adequately sustain the populations that we need
going into the future?
And on the population side, are the population objectives relevant now?
Given changes in carrying capacity, given the desires of the public at large,
we need to go back and revisit those population objectives that that have been
so important in the North American plan.
The second recommendation dealing with people, addresses the need to embrace not
only the public at large so that they are supportive of our conservation work,
but also the hunters; and it's different strategies.
The hunters need to know that we're addressing their needs
in terms of regulations, in terms of accesses in places to hunt
and all of the things that bear on hunter recruitment and retention.
Those are all important for the future of waterfowl management.
When it comes to the public at large, we know that they care about the ecological
benefits that come from our conservation work.
What we need to do is translate that caring into
active support of conservation.
The third recommendation that deals with integration is really important
if we're gonna move our management and our conservation ahead
into the next decades,
we have to get better at linking population actions with
habitat conservation, with our work with people, and we need to link those together
much more formally than we are now so we can be efficient and effective
and relevant in the decades ahead.
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>>During the development of the plan and then the Action Plan discussions,
we had people ask us: "So, ho are you gonna do this? How are you gonna
integrate Waterfowl Management?"
And the answer is: we aren't going to do it ourselves,
it's going to take everybody in the community.
And certainly the NAWMP science support team,
the flyways and the Flyway Councils, the human dimension working groups,
Those are all going to be important support groups.
But in the end, its gonna take all of us working together
and that's the beauty of the North American plan. That's why it's
always has been so successful and that's why it'll succeed again.
The Action Plan's intended to provide a road map for the future,
but it doesn't have all the answers.
There's gonna be a lot of work to be done, there's gonna be
discoveries made, some dead ends encountered. The important thing is
it'll be a living document, knowing that we're gonna make continual improvements
and over time, new versions will come out and we'll adapt and move
forward as a community.
I remember 1986 when the original plan was being drafted and
thinking "boy this really is kind of a last chance for a waterfowl,
that if we don't get this right,
it may be the end of these populations at least at huntable levels."
Now I look and I see populations are high, but you know i think we face
challenges that are every bit as as dire and immediate as we did back in '86,
but they're different. There're people disconnected from nature,
there's a public that doesn't necessarily want to invest in conservation
there're economic challenges, and there are environmental challenges.
So, we really have to get this right I think because the challenges this time
around are every bit as dire and every bit as important to address.
Take the time to read the documents, get involved either through flyway councils, joint ventures,
or your agencies. It's important that everyone get engaged.
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