Future Upland Gamebird Extension Programs in Montana: Assessing the Needs of County Agents

In cooperation with Pheasants Forever and Montana State University, I surveyed all 48 county extension agents in Montana who have roles in addressing wildlife and natural resource issues.  Twenty-five replies were received, which was a response rate of 52%.  Agents expressed considerable interest by landowners and producers in various aspects of upland gamebird management.  Sixty-eight percent of agents perceived that the current interest in gamebirds by ranchers, agricultural producers, and other landowners is either medium or high, and that interest will remain stable through 2021.  Information on food plots was expressed as being the greatest need, with recommendations for plantings to improve game bird habitat being foremost.  Nearly all agents (88%) indicated that producers have considerable interest in cover crops in small grain, including the implications for upland gamebirds.  Based on responses received, I recommend that demonstration days and field tours will be the most useful tools to incorporate in future extension program development.  Agents also expressed a need for making wildlife expertise available via email.  Seventy-nine percent of agents placed substantial priority on in-service training for themselves in gamebird ecology and management, so this is also a valuable future program.  I believe that county extension agents can have a significant effect on providing guidance to the future of upland gamebird management by agricultural producers.  In so doing, gamebird habitat and numbers might be positively affected across a large portion of Montana

Artificial intelligence based decision support for trumpeter swan management

Department Head: Susan G. Stafford.2002 Spring.Includes bibliographical references (pages 108-114).The number of trumpeter swans (Cygnus buccinator) breeding in the Tri-State area where Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming come together has declined to just a few hundred pairs. However, these birds are part of the Rocky Mountain Population which additionally has over 3,500 birds breeding in Alberta, British Columbia, Northwest Territories, and Yukon Territory. To a large degree, these birds seem to have abandoned traditional migratory pathways in the flyway. Waterfowl managers have been interested in decision support tools that would help them explore simulated management scenarios in their quest towards reaching population recovery and the reestablishment of traditional migratory pathways. I have developed a decision support system to assist biologists with such management, especially related to wetland ecology. Decision support systems use a combination of models, analytical techniques, and information retrieval to help develop and evaluate appropriate alternatives. Swan management is a domain that is ecologically complex, and this complexity is compounded by spatial and temporal issues. The Distributed Environment Centered Agent Framework (DECAF) was successful at integrating communications among agents, integrating ecological knowledge, and simulating swan distributions through implementation of a queuing system. The work I have conducted indicates a need for determining what other factors might allow a deeper understanding of the effects of management actions on the flyway distribution of waterfowl. Knowing those would allow the more refined development of algorithms for effective decision support systems via collaboration by intelligent agents. Additional, specific conclusions and ideas for future research related both to waterfowl ecology and to the use of multiagent systems have been triggered by the validation work

Mapping the Future of Oil and Gas Development in Relation to the Conservation of Greater Sage Grouse

The effects of oil and gas development on the conservation of greater sage grouse (Centrocercus urophasianus) is of concern in the Northeastern portion of their current range that coincides partially with grouse Management Zones I, II, and IV.  Although some research has reported on these effects, much remains uncertain.  This is often the case with ecological studies where cause-effect relationships are complex, multivariate, and involve landscape perspectives.  Gaining an understanding of the effects of the development on grouse requires predicting where that development is expected to occur on a landscape level.  We gathered the “reasonable foreseeable development” spatial data from the USDI’s Bureau of Land Management that were available for Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Wyoming, and Northwestern Colorado.  These data were disparate across the study area, and we standardized them across mapping units to establish consistent and quantitative categories.  We describe the GIS processes used to accomplish that and to display the number of wells per township as projected in the BLM data.  The data were then overlain with the priority areas for conservation for greater sage grouse.  Our data, metadata, and data processing (standardization) documentation will be made available on the web via the Landscape Conservation Management and Analysis Portal (LCMAP— https://www. sciencebase.gov/ catalog/?community=LC+MAP+-+Landscape+Conservation+Management +and+Analysis+Portal).  Companion research to model the risk to greater sage grouse from oil and gas development has also begun.  This uses artificial intelligence and Bayesian belief network software to represent knowledge and its uncertainty as presented in the scientific literature, and we present our conceptual model

Developing Priorities for the Great Northern Landscape Conservation Cooperative: State Wildlife Action Plans (SWAP) as One Piece of Information

Landscape Conservation Cooperatives (LCCs) are public-private partnerships that focus on natural resource challenges which transcend political and jurisdictional boundaries and require a more holistic, collaborative, and adaptive approach to conservation that is firmly grounded in science and strives to ensure the sustainability of land, water, wildlife and cultural resources. The Great Northern LCC, covering Western Montana and parts of several other states and provinces, is nearing completion of a process that synthesizes conservation priorities among the 25 organizations represented on the Steering Committee and their partners. This Strategic Conservation Framework identifies priority species, ecosystems, and ecosystem processes across the landscape represented by the Great Northern LCC based on synthetic summarizations of five state-based Wildlife Action Plans, 40 other regional conservation planning documents, and focused interviews with key personnel across the region. Here we report on the process by which we analyzed data from the State Wildlife Action Plans (SWAPs) of ID, MT, OR, WA, and WY and from Strategic Habitat Conservation as one piece of information for strategic planning. Thirty-five species of greatest conservation need (as defined in the SWAPs) were identified as having commonality across the five states. The ranges of these species were then overlain and a map of areas with the greatest number of species of conservation need can be visualized across the Great Northern LCC

Exploring Adaptive Management for Greater Sage Grouse in Northern Montana in the Face of Climate Change

A collaboration has begun in Montana among several state and federal agencies and non-governmental organizations interested in the management of greater sage grouse (Centrocercus urophasianus) in a > 5,000,000-ac (> 20,234-ha) landscape including the Charles M. Russell National Wildlife Refuge. The first step was conducting personal interviews with field biologists and managers in the general area to assess what management actions they are making. Using this information, we conducted an on-line survey to further identify those actions and how they are made. Finally, almost 40 managers and scientists met to discuss whether an adaptive management approach might be useful to gain an understanding of the interaction among habitats and management actions and how this will be affected by annual weather and climate patterns. A conceptual model of how these factors affect the life cycle of grouse has been drafted, and we are gathering comments on it. The intent is for that to be used as an ecological response model for assessing the effects of possible climate change scenarios. Future work will entail: (1) further delineation of management actions and the social networks associated with them, (2) building and evaluating a working model using rapid prototype methods, (3) conducting futures analyses of associated landscapes, (4) continuing to foster collaborative effort, and (5) working one-onone with managers to evaluate model and adaptive management applicability using such tools as LCMAP (Landscape Conservation Management and Analysis Portal)

13.4.13. Management and Control of Cattails

The response of wetland vegetation to management can only be interpreted by considering an intricate mix of physiological, ecological, and temporal factors. Because cattail management is important for many freshwater marshes, the purpose of this leaflet is to present autecological principles for such management. A 50:50 ratio of open water and vegetation is a frequent objective when managing cattail marshes in North America. When a particular marsh has been extensively flooded for some time and few cattails remain, managers may wish to foster more cattails to develop such hemi-marsh conditions. The reverse is followed when a marsh is dominated by cattails. Hemi-marsh conditions are optimal for breeding migratory birds, including most waterfowl, black and Forster’s terns, American coots, and yellow-headed blackbirds. During the nonbreeding season, the life history requirements of migratory birds are not as closely tied to the hemi-marsh conditions. However, such wetlands still provide excellent habitat. Cattails are prolific and can quickly dominate a wetland plant community. Monotypic stands of cattails have reduced overall habitat value but do benefit some species of wildlife. They provide excellent habitat for wintering white-tailed deer and ring-necked pheasants and habitat for breeding marsh wrens, least bitterns, and various species of blackbirds. However, hemi-marshes also are habitat for these species, too. Cattails also provide excellent roosting habitat for blackbirds that can severely damage adjacent crops, especially sunflowers in the prairie states. Elimination of the cattail stand removes roosting habitat and can reduce local damage, but the damage is often simply shifted to other areas where the displaced birds create new roosts. Although the vegetation cycle in prairie marshes is based on the cycle of wet and dry years on the prairies, its basic principles apply to cattail management elsewhere. The cycle of a semipermanent marsh has four stages: dry, regenerating, degenerating, or lake marsh. Identifying the existing stage of a wetland is the first step toward determining the appropriate direction of subsequent management. Generally, all wetlands with cattails in their flora mimic aspects of this prairie marsh cycle. However, certain hydrologic conditions can lengthen the duration of any stage to such an extreme that no cycle is apparent

Best practices for conceptual modelling in environmental planning and management

Conceptual modelling is used in many fields with a varying degree of formality. In environmental applications, conceptual models are used to express relationships, explore and test ideas, check inference and causality, identify knowledge and data gaps, synchronize mental models and build consensus, and to highlight key or dominant processes. Due to their sometimes apparent simplicity, development and use of a conceptual model is often an attractive option when tackling an environmental problem situation. However, we have experienced many examples where conceptual modelling has failed to effectively assist in the resolution of environmental problems. This paper explores development and application of conceptual modelling to environmental problems, and identifies a range of best practices for environmental scientists and managers that include considerations of stakeholder participation and trust, model development and representation, integration of different and disparate conceptual models, model maturation, testing, and transition to application within the problem situation. Crown Copyright (C) 2016 Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved

Identifying the decision to be supported: A review of papers from environmental modelling and software

Two of the basic tenets of decision support system efforts are to help identify and structure the decisions to be supported, and to then provide analysis in how those decisions might be best made. One example from wetland management would be that wildlif