Name: Osama Quddus

Roll Number: MUST/FA19-BFT-005/AJK

Department: FORESTRY
Semester: 6th
Assignment Subject: Wildlife and fisheries Management(Theory)
Submitted to: Sir Usama Dar
Question: What are the principles of wildlife management?

Wildlife Population Management

Ecological Principles

Carrying Capacity - Wildlife managers try to maintain wildlife populations in

balance with available habitat resources. The ability of a habitat to support any
given level of wildlife is referred to as the carrying capacity of the habitat. When
wildlife populations are below carrying capacity, resources are not being fully
utilized. When populations are lower than the desired objectives, managers
implement activities designed to increase reproductive output and survival. This
generally includes habitat manipulation. Other techniques include legal protection
for migratory or endangered species, captive breeding and release, and restocking.

Successful population management can result in wildlife densities that are too high
for the available habitat. Wildlife overabundance can result from a sudden loss of
habitat forcing individuals into less space or from successful reproduction in the
absence of predators or other mortality factors. If the former is the cause, balance
is often restored in a short time. However, if wildlife populations are allowed to
grow in the absence of natural regulation from predators then undesired
consequences can include overgrazing and habitat destruction, conflicts with
humans, increased healthy and safety concerns, and sudden die-offs of individuals.

Overgrazing and habitat destruction by one wildlife population can result in loss
of habitat for other species. Conflicts with humans can result in damage to
human landscapes and property. Healthy and safety concerns can include disease
and predation risks. Carrying capacity really has two components. Biological
carrying capacity is the ability of the habitat or environment to support a given
population size. Cultural carrying capacity is the tolerance humans have for a
given population size.

For example, the habitat may be able to support 100 deer but if those deer are
contributing to increase deer-automobile collisions or eating human landscape and
gardens then the cultural carrying capacity is less that biological carrying capacity
and management action is warranted. Action could include hunting and trapping,
fertility control (although this is largely experimental with wild populations), trap
and relocate programs (costly and often illegal), or introduction of predators. Each
of these management tools has distinct advantages and disadvantages and each is
not without controversy. Wildlife managers must work with other citizens and
stakeholders to try to achieve an acceptable comprise solution.

Habitat Management – Habitat management may be one of the best ways to

increase or decrease wildlife populations. Habitats can be created using the tools
we discussed above. Habitats can be improved with fire and timber harvest or
other techniques. For direct management, habitat must be acquired before
management can take place. For management across broad ecosystems, the land
must be owned by the government, or agreements must be made among mixed
public and private landowners. Various incentives, regulations, or educational
programs also may be used to encourage management by private forest
landowners.

Habitat acquisition is accomplished through a variety of methods. The federal

government and individual states can acquire land by purchase or donation. Non-
government organizations also acquire, manage, and sometimes donate land for
wildlife management activities. Funds for state wildlife management and habitat
acquisitions come from user fees like licenses and specialized taxes on outdoor
equipment. Only rarely do general tax revenues support wildlife management at
the state level.

Wildlife Damage Management – When wildlife populations become too

abundant, managers step into to resolve human-wildlife conflicts. Generally, when
this occurs, cultural carrying capacity has been exceeded. Lethal and non-lethal
methods are available for wildlife damage management. Public education may
solve simple problems like raccoons eating pet food. A solution may be as simple
as sealing the pet food in containers with tight lids. However, other conflicts may
require more complex solutions. Habitat modification can be used to alter habitats
and make it unattractive to nuisance wildlife. Exclusion methods such as fences or
other barriers may prevent wildlife from causing damage. Another method may
include chemical repellents which can be effective in certain situations. A final
solution may require lethal control such as mouse traps and poison baits or sport
hunting.

Game keeping
Gamekeeping is the management or control of wildlife for the well-being of game
and may include the killing of other animals which share the same niche or
predators to maintain a high population of more profitable species, such as
pheasants introduced into woodland. In his 1933 book Game Management, Aldo
Leopold, one of the pioneers of wildlife management as a science, defined it as "the
art of making land produce sustained annual crops of wild game for recreational
use".
Harvest
Managers may strive to reduce or maintain populations so animals conflict less
with human activities. For example, white-tailed deer are abundant in urban areas.
This presents challenges for wildlife managers because hunting with firearms is
not allowed. The most effective solution has been controlled hunts. Monkey
population in urban India can be controlled by capture and release in wild areas.
Endangered species Management
Endangered or threatened species require intensive management. Critical habitat
and locations of existing populations must be identified so they can be managed
successfully. An animal species is considered endangered when its numbers
become so low that experts think it may become extinct unless action is taken to
save it. Threatened species’ populations are showing signs of unnatural decline or
they are vulnerable to becoming endangered. Many endangered or threatened
species are specialists that have very restrictive habitat needs and eat specialized
foods. The leading cause for a species becoming endangered or threatened is
habitat loss.
Species Reintroduction
Another wildlife management goal may be to re-establish species in suitable
habitat. The lost species can be reintroduced from other areas once again in
reintroduction programs and management efforts. Study of biology and ecological
requirements of the species is necessary before the introductions.
Conservation and preservation
Wildlife conservation helps ensure future generations can enjoy our resources.
Conservation can include harvesting natural resources, activities such as hunting,
fishing, trapping and harvesting timber as well as non-consumptive activities such
as bird watching, photography, and hiking. Conservation must balance issues
between wildlife and human populations. Conservation of wildlife implies insuring
threatened and endangered species receive special management to protect their
presence in the future.
Direct Population Control: Direct population control refers to the removal
(harvesting) or addition (reintroduction and translocation) of animals. Removal is
usually used when the animal is a game species and can also be controlled by
hunting license quotas. Its main advantages are that it is species specific, the
number of animals removed can be closely controlled, and it has limited impact on
the environment. Reintroductions and translocations are important methods for
enhancing the viability of existing populations and reducing the species risk of
extinction
Socio Ecological principles
Maintain diversity and redundancy: In a social-ecological system, components
such as species, landscape types, knowledge systems, actors, cultural groups or
institutions all provide different options for responding to change and dealing with
uncertainty and surprise. Systems with many different components (e.g species,
actors or sources of knowledge) are generally more resilient than systems with few
components. Redundancy provides ‘insurance’ within a system by allowing some
components to compensate for the loss or failure of others. Redundancy is even
more valuable if the components providing the redundancy also react differently to
change and disturbance (response diversity).

Conserve and value redundancy: Redundancy is seldom explicitly conserved or

managed, but is just as important as diversity in providing resilience. Particular
focus should be paid to important functions or services with low redundancy, such
as those controlled by key species or actors. In some cases it may be possible to
increase the redundancy associated with these functions.
Manage connectivity: Connectivity can be both a good and a bad thing. High
levels of connectivity can facilitate recovery after a disturbance but highly
connected systems can also spread disturbances faster. Connectivity can both
enhance and reduce the resilience of social-ecological systems and the ecosystem
services they produce. Well-connected systems can overcome and recover from
disturbances more quickly, but overly connected systems may lead to the rapid
spread of disturbances across the entire system so that all components of the
system are impacted. Connectivity refers to the structure and strength with which
resources, species or actors disperse, migrate or interact across patches, habitats or
social domains in a social-ecological system. Consider, for example, patches of
forests connected in a landscape: the forest landscape is the system, the forest
patches are parts of the system. How they are linked together determines how easy
it is for an organism to move from one patch to another. In every system,
connectivity refers to the nature and strength of the interactions between the
various components.

Manage slow variables and feedbacks: Social-ecological systems can often be

“configured” in several different ways. In other words, there are many ways in
which all the variables in a system can be connected and interact with one another,
and these different configurations provide different ecosystem services. In a
rapidly changing world, managing slow variables and feedbacks is often crucial to
keep social-ecological systems “configured” and functioning in ways that produce
essential ecosystem services. If these systems shift into a different configuration or
regime, it can be extremely difficult to reverse.
The key challenge in managing slow variables and feedback is identifying the key
slow variables and feedbacks that maintain the social-ecological regimes which
produce desired ecosystem services, and identifying where the critical thresholds
lie that can lead to a reconfiguration of the system. Once this is known, even
tentatively, the following guidelines can be applied:
Strengthen feedbacks that maintain desirable regimes: For example, hard coral
reefs provide ecosystem services such as fisheries and ecotourism, but stresses
such as climate change and fishing can cause the system to shift to a regime
dominated by seaweed. The resilience of the hard coral regime can be enhanced by
promoting the abundance of herbivores, such as parrot fish, that graze on seaweed
and thereby provide a dampening feedback. Governance structures that prevent
overfishing and protect reef users can also create dampening feedbacks that helps
maintain the hard coral regime.
Avoid actions that obscure feedbacks: Certain activities and subsidies can mask or
distort dampening feedbacks. Within the fishing industry, most organizations are
legally restricted to a defined geographic location. This means that they have an
incentive not to overfish, as it would undermine their longer term livelihood
options. However, marine ‘roving bandits’, illegal and unregistered fishing vessels
that move around the world and deplete local fisheries, undermine local institutions
as they have no incentive to ensure the sustainability of fisheries in particular
places. In other words, they sidestep the feedback between fish stocks and fish
harvest by continuously moving around the world.
Monitor important slow variables: This is crucial in order to detect slow changes
that may cause the system to cross a threshold and reorganize into a different
regime. However, financial constraints are causing monitoring programmes all
over the world to be cut. Understanding the role of slow variables and feedbacks
can help managers recognize that investing in monitoring programmes that focus
on the variables that underlie system functioning can be very cost-effective.
Establish governance structures that can respond to monitoring information:
Knowledge and monitoring information is not enough to avoid regime shifts that
can threaten ecosystem services. Establishing governance structures that can
effectively respond to monitoring information is equally critical. One innovative
example is the approach applied in the Kruger National Park in South Africa. Their
system called “thresholds of potential concern” is based on constantly updated
knowledge about key environmental indicators. If monitoring indicates that a
critical threshold has been reached or is about to be reached, it triggers a formal
meeting where it is required that a decision is taken on whether to take remedial
action or adjust the suspected threshold to a new level.