The following schedule is from the 72nd Annual Conference of the Southeastern Association of Fish & Wildlife Agencies which was held October 21-24, 2018 in Mobile, Alabama.
AUTHORS: Heath Hagy, Mindy Rice, Adam Smith: U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
ABSTRACT: The majority of National Wildlife Refuges (NWR) that are priorities for waterfowl in the Southeast conduct monitoring to help evaluate current management practices and guide future allocation of resources. However, current waterfowl monitoring programs vary in scope, scale, and overall design. Inconsistencies in data collection and methodological documentation make amalgamation at the regional scale difficult and tracking of trends over time at individual NWRs troublesome. However, several NWRs have monitoring data available that can be useful in evaluating factors that influence waterfowl use and designing more robust and coordinated monitoring programs. For example, the Integrated Waterbird Management and Monitoring (IWMM) program can be used as a platform to increase consistency of data collection and management, track important factors that influence use over time, and document effects of management for waterfowl on NWRs. We will use available data from multiple NWRs in the Southeast to evaluate environmental and local-scale management factors affecting waterfowl use. Results will help NWR staff prioritize monitoring efforts and efficiently collect data that is informative for management. Moreover, we will provide examples of efficient and effective monitoring designs for generating overall waterfowl use days and peak abundances using migration curves and a single point-in-time survey. Results from these analyses will be useful in creating large scale (e.g., NWR Complex, Area, or Region), coordinated waterfowl monitoring frameworks to increase cost-efficiency of data collection and overall capacity for science-based waterfowl management on NWRs in the Southeast.
