Rural System's

Modern Wild Faunal Resource System Management

[ Web site Home | The Course's Home | Table of Contents | The Finder | Glossary ]

The Meaning of a Systems Approach to Wildlife Management

An Invitational Paper Presented to the Staff of the Bureau of Sport Fisheries and Wildlife,Washington, D.C.

Sooner or later there intrudes into every dicipline or professional endeavor a revolutionary technique, concept, or approach that has great inherent power. Such an approach usually lays around, preens, and makes courtship displays before it is allowed to enter. Once the entry has been made, then change can occur, for change does occur when strong people wield powerful ideas.

I want to tell you strong people today about a powerful idea which in our time can (1) revolutionize wildlife management, (2) can command for you a significant leadership role in international wildlife management practice, (3) can produce for you a new image within the broad field of wildland resource management,particularly the Department, and (4) allow you to accomplish your objectives more precisely and economically. I do not promise pie-in-the-sky; I offer you a chance to join me on a trip that is real, practical, exciting, and already paying-off daily. This powerful idea is a systems approach to wildlife management.

Conservation, no matter whether defined as "wise use" or not, is geared to preservation. Practitioners of conservation fall easy prey to conservative thought--the maintenance of the status quo--the practice of historical thought. The conservatism of conservationists is an awesome attitude with which to reckon. You and I are its victims and we can only escape with great efforts.

The beat today is no longer pre-Victorian; the beat is swinging. The world is more like "Tiajuana Brass" than "Who Beat Finnegan on the Bunkhouse Floor." We can change only if we shake ourselves hard enough to become free enough to think freely -- think through some of the old problems, and even the old answers -- all the way through.

Do not misunderstand; what has been going on in the past has not been wrong or bad. I am not in the least critical of those who used poultices the day before penicillin, or suffered polio before Saulk and Sabine. The problems for which I propose answers are not those you have ignored or solved badly; I simply offer a new tool, a new approach to brand new, changing, and growing problems. The solution comes at a time when it is badly needed. It is not a cure-all, but it can cure if accepted for all its strength.

Definition

A system is a whole "thing." A system is what you want it to be just so long as it is viewed holistically, if it has interactive components, if it has a common purpose, i.e., all components essentially functioning toward a common objective. A system can be any size (a pair of tagging pliers can be considered a system) but for our purposes a system is large like an industrial plant, a forest, a management unit, an ecosystem, a refuge, a whole data-collection and analysis procedure, or a Bureau. Obviously then, systems are complex with multiple interactions. Because they are so large, complex, and complicated, they are incomprehendible in finite time by mere humans and thus their study and manipulation often relies upon the computer. One other aspect of the idea is that a system is always a sub-system; you can always think of how two or more systems compose a larger system. Thus the concept is useful for the refuge assistant or the Secretary of the Interior or the U.N. Secretary General.

The Difference

Now some of you skeptics will say, "that's nothing new; he's just playing with words, trying to make something complex out of something simple." Maybe I am, as far as some of you are concerned, but the evidence suggests that if you and I are saying and thinking the same things, then there's something radically wrong because we're taking different actions based on this thought.

What is special or new about a systems approach?

1. A systems approach focuses intently upon the following diagram.
   

   A wildlifer using the approach sees a system as a dynamic, interactive whole that malfunctions when any aspect is ignored or weakened. The parts of the stsrem are:

   • INPUT - is data, policy, regulations, economic, ecological, and social constraints and restrictions.
   • PROCESS - is the manipulation of these components, the description of the dynamic, the expression of the interaction and relation, the tests, comparisons, and correlations of the components toward the achievement of some purpose.
   • OUTPUT - is the yield, the payoff, the decision, the recommendation, the action of the system. In designing a system, e.g., a management system or a report generating system, the focus is immediately on the question "what is the real objective; what is the exact, measurable output desired?"
   • FEEDBACK and CONTROL - is effect of the system on itself. It is the internal messages that say speed-up, slow down, modify, switch to another set of solutions, play another strategy.
   • LOOK AHEAD - is the capability to simulate a process, predict the future, and based on expectations, to modify the system.

   The greatest people in your agencies have been intuitively following this approach for years. Yes, they might have been following it exactly. However, the probability is that there is enough unique about a systems approach to make it new and special. It is a well-defined, complete, holistic, dynamic idea that can be articulated. The previous simple diagram and description makes the approach available for the inspection and use by the poorest members of your staffs and even for the improvement of the great members.

2. A systems approach is invariably concerned with minimization or maximization. For industry the emphasis is on maximization of profit, minimization of losses. For wildlifers, the emphasis is on maximization of annual output of endangered species, minimization of crippling loss, maximization of arrests per unit of enforcement tune, minimization of crop damage, maximization of party hours of hunter recreation of a specific quality, minimization of research costs, maximization of applicable research conclusions per unit of time since reporting, and other similar objectives.

   Absolute maxima or minima are almost impossible to discover or impractical to attempt managerially. The idea of "optimum" is more important. Best-mixes of variables, best estimates, and maximums under certain constraints have more managerial meaning. Multiple-use management, then, is an optimization problem.

3. A systems appraoch resists suboptimization. As problems become more critical, as more and more specialists add more and more variables and better estimates of probabilities, it becomes increasingly difficult to know if the best solution has been achieved. The press is on for the optimum; modern society has more sophisticated needs; suboptima are unacceptable. A systems approach helps avoid the dangers of suboptimization.
4. A systems approach will invariably use the computer. Just as it is impossible to talk about marsh management without talking about dikes, it is impossible to talk about a systems approach without talking about computers. The computer is a wonderful mechanical slave, infinitely stupid, fast as lightning, impossilbe to bore, a pile of expensive junk that will do exactly what you tell it--until you tell it to stop. I want to emphasize the basic importance of the computer, not only for what physical operations it will perform but for what else it will do or cause to be done.

   It is a terrible taskmaster, requiring the most precise, explicit definition and communication.

   It is wonderfully logical and, as its apprentices, it carries computer workers along with its pattern and strength. It will perform no undefined tasks and in its demands for precision it requires step-by-step problem analysis, description, and specification of measurable outputs.

   One delightful by-product of all this is that once problems are seen very, very clearly (as required for computer handling) their solutions are frequently very obvious.

5. A systems approach, as no other approach, can contribute toward extending the capabilities and understanding of the human problem-solving process. The approach looks inward on itself in developing theoretical understanding of the tools of management.
6. The systems approach has the capability (end uses it effectively~)to store tremendous amounts of data and information of all kinds, to retrieve this information at fantastic speeds, and to report results very rapidly.

Notes on the Proper Nature of Wildlife Management

The entire field of wildlife management is heading for radical reform. I am willing to bear the burden of scoffs and catcalls of "naive" because I am committed to the idea and see reform gradually occurring. I am actively working with revolutionary ideas, confident of eventual success. It will occur when you and I see the needs of people through wildlife are not being met and will rise to meet them. Reform will occur when the emerging new breed of wildlife student who cannot tolerate the existing employing agencies, drop out and then as rich insurance men they begin to engage the agency from the outside with revolutionary questions and political activism. This can be taken as a threat of the future or the exciting challenge of today.

I define wildlife management as the science and art of changing the characteristics and interactions of habitats, wild animal populations, and people in order to achieve specific human goals by means of the wildlife resource. Leopold's 1933 definition is intolerably limited.

I see at least 13 basic philosophical approaches to wildlife management, each with a specific exclusive objective. An abstract of this list is in Table 1.

Table 1. Nominal philosophical approaches to big game management and concommitant 13 objectives

Preservation - To stabilize or increase a population at or above a minimum recovery density but less than carrying capacity using whatever means possible. Species per se - To maintain a population of a particular species. Wilderness - To maintain big game in a wilderness environment in variety and normal abundance compatible with other wilderness uses and adjoining land uses. Esthetic - To produce numbers, species, and characteristics of big game in the proper setting for esthetic benefits to the maximum number of appreciative people. Trophy - To produce quantities of quality big game trophies. Sporting Recreation - To produce the maximum amount and variety of recreation for people through all big game hunting activities, observations, and experiences. Multiple Use - To produce maximum big game values within the restrictions or limits imposed by production-optimizing efforts with other resources on the same management area. Economic - To maintain game as an attraction and goal for people who will strengthen the economy of the community or government. Quasi-exploitation - To take for purposes of profit the maximum number of animals without destroying the major base resource. Production - To produce a sustained maximum yield of meat, hides, furs, and other products from big game. Entrepreneur - To produce maximum personal or corporate income through continuing big game management. Control - To reduce populations or animal behavior detrimental to man's interest. Exploitation - To use big game to the fullest when values seem to be the highest.

Example of a combination: "Production-Preservation - Multiple-use Philosophy" objectives:

The major objectives of this big game management agency are

1. to evaluate existing game range conditions,
2. to improve range carrying capacity through manipulation of environmental resistances to populations,
3. to produce a maximum number of animals for harvest while maintaining an optimum breeding density compatible with other land uses, and
4. to educate people to these ends.

The wildlife manager of the past has been too oriented toward INPUT. He has been trained as a descriptive ecologist. The new wildlifer will be a PROCESS person, a manipulator, a mover, a shaper of systems and their dynamics. He will be skeptically and critically focused on OUTPUT, on philosophical bases and objectives, on meeting the needs of people through wildland resources. His education will have a T structure. He will have a particular high level competence in one important aspect of wildlife management, e.g., population dynamics or economics. This is the base of the T. He will "cross the T" with involvement and continued growth in related areas like computer science, managerial economics, decision theory, zoology, soil science, or agronomy.

The wildlife manager, the master's-degree graduate, will be a well-educated person, geared to the manipulation of (1) animal populations, (2) habitat, and (3) people and their interactions. He will be one of the "heads" for whom many "hands" and a computer works. He will utilize his humanity to the fullest, leaving to machines those things that machines do best. He will be optimizing the output of a staff of people both in number, training, best application of skills and training, and proper combinations of people and machine to achieve objectives efficiently

He will not be a tractor driver, a gopher choker, or a coot counter. He will be a professional wildland scientist entrusted with great responsibility and impelled to achieve for his profession, organiztion, and his society.

We already know how to manage wildlife well; we're like the farmer: "not farming now half as good as I know how." We'll start managing well when we stop encouraging and employing mediocre students who are inadequately educated for the jobs they must do, not now, but for the next ten years. Whether they are trained for what they do now seems to me largely irrelevant in selecting current employees for a large organization. The half-life of professional competence is so short and the rate of innovation so rapid that conventional higher education has little meaning.

I do not digress from the topic as you may suspect. A systems approach is a very humanistic approach. It deplores the waste of human potential; it encourages systems providing optimally for human needs; it encourages the search for and achievement of the human potential through maximum use of machines to allow man to do best what he can do--respond, create, solve, observe, describe, and decide. The systems approach requires the fullest committment from top quality sensitive land scientists. When they cannot (or will not) be obtained for an organization then the few there, utilizing the computer to the fullest, will be able to manage the resource better than it is now being managed.

The Applications

I wish to describe some of what has been done and what can be done by application of the systems approach.

One of my students, Charles Buffington, designed a data processing and analysis system for Idaho big game.

One complete and continuous process automatically sends out three waves of questionnaires to license buyers, accumulates kill report cards, synthesizes these and total licences purchased and descriptive data of the state into a computer memory and proceeds to update estimates and rates of change according to the past five years, does many elaborate statistical calculations including multiple regressions, tests for significant differences between years, and generates on off-set printing plates two complete texts (with mailing addresses) to (1) professional wildlifers and (2) to the public who responded to questionnaires and to the press. This is primarily a harvest analysis but it integrates land characteristics and quantifies changes (e.g., in horn curl of big horns, antler development), relates kill to changing habitat, and compares actual to desired or maximum harvests. In other words it extracts all needed information from the costly data and reports it within one month after the close of the season -- before, not after, regulations and plans are made by the state for the coming year. It provides maximum information in a useable form for making the management decision.

The U.S.F.S. in Missoula is now programming my browse-field simulation. It takes the known curves of browse field succession, ties these to pounds of quality food produced per acre and generates 5 tables (1) current inventory of fields by size, production, stage of succession, and animal units supported; (2) a table showing the past 5 years and the future 5 years of production; (3) a table showing animal units produced in any 10 specified years, such as for answering "why were the deer so few in 1932?" ;(4) a table stating the time at which a specified number of fields of a specified acreage must be initiated by fire, herbicides or cutting to produce browse compatible with a desired population rate of change; and (5) a table stating the consequences of failure to achieve the treatments over the years. The budgetary and planning utility of this simulation program is obvious.

I have developed 5 teaching programs, some of them dialogical with the computer. We discuss certain complex equations of population dynamics in class and then have the computer make solutions or generate tables for use by the students in solving problems based on their understanding of the equations. K.E.F. Watt outlines many other uses in his two books Ecology and Resource Management and Systems Analysis in Ecology.

A student, Robert Fales, is now exploring applications of the Southwest Forest Experiment Station's (Berkeley) Map Information and Display System (MIADS) to wildlife management. For example, whole ranger districts can be cover mapped on the computer and each type given a rate of change. By several runs, maps can be generated for cover types of the future. Budgetary and planning implications of such maps are obvious. When the cover type producing 1000 deer is growing out of reach at a rate described in an equation, then the future can be predicted--starvation losses prevented by hunters, and claims of mismanagement and herd reduction explained or effectively fought.

If we can study and determine optimim search patterns for submarine destroyers in the ocean then we can determine optimum search strategy for wildlife law enforcement agents given a road network, zones of probability of detection, and other factors.

We can use the portable computer unit now in use by Chicago area farmers. The unit is connected by telephone to a central computer. Farmers receive instant information on how to control weeds under the many specific conditions that exist that influence such decisions. Three-thousand fields have been processed; 91 % of the farmers using the recommendations received significant benefits in weed control.

The accounting and personnel information of your agencies are probably already functional and well known to you. Ecological information storage and retrieval systems are similarly built.

The problem of management of wildlife in refuge forests requires a face-up to target-species management or multiple use management. To maximize a forest for wild turkeys is to make it les than maximum for deer, squirrel, bear, and grouse. The same results occur for any other one species maximization. Optimizations under a multiple use policy requires (1) determining species priority for an area, e.g., as from a questionnaire of users and potential users, (2) stating minimum needs for each species, (3) stating managerial limits to land treatment costs, and (4) stating an objective function such as "to maximize the number of successful hunter-dy s of average quality forest game hunts." This complex problem can be solved by a tool of the systems approach--linear programming.

Tools

What are the tools? Some of them are (1) logic, (2) linear programming, (3) dynamic programming, (4) game theory, (5) decision theory, (6) simulation, and (7) critical path analysis and PERT. The digital and analog computers are used with most of these.

Systems Analysis and Design

Systems analysis springs from, is motivated by, the refreshing knowledge that there is a reason for and a way of handling a detailed analysis of even the most complex systems. No computer is needed at this stage, although one can be employed for some purposes. What is needed is rigorous work with the previously shown diagram of a system. The analysis of an ecosystem involves studies of and careful lists of the inputs- energy, nutrients, existing biomass, water, topography and others. It involves yet unaccomplished descriptions of the ecosystem processes- like photosynthesis. It requires definition and analysis of outputs- what are they really?, and how are they best described? animal units? biomass? calories per gram of animal biomass? or protein per acre?

By such analysis, the ecosystem manipulator, the new wildland manager, can think through or actually see~ what the consequences of new inputs (like fertilizer) are to outputs. He can see the consequences of trying to speed up or retard certain processes or perhaps initiate new ones. He can be more certain that the outputs are desired, or, if undesired, can see that, through proper feedback, either the input or process is modified to improve the output.

Those working with managerial systems related to wildland resource management contribute the most when they analyze their problems carefully, state desired objectives or outcomes, examine the potential ways of achieving these goals, describe the information essential for high probabilities of achieving these goals, and build in corrective, up-grading, and up-dating feedback and controls. In managerial systems, the problems of analysis and design are interwoven. Rarely is there a need to design a brand-new system. Usually there is need to analyze existing systems and modify them or redesign them for solving problems, providing answers, or projecting alternatives for solutions. This is not to say that there is no need for fresh starts, completely new and creative designing, but such creativity in the government agency seems politically impractical. Great organizations will put at least a few people to work on such tasks. The results of their work can create welcome standards for comparison, provide a vision, and generate change, however slow and uncomfortable.

Limitations

Some of you are saying "it can't be all good" or are dying to ask questions like "well what about...?" Certainly there are limitations. No tool, no approach to a problem as large as you face will summarily solve it. A systems approach is powerful, not all-powerful.

The major limitations are that thought is difficult and very time consuming. The systems approach is a thoughtful approach. Like the computer "garbage in, garbage out") GIGO, poor systems can be built. Fortunately, if built with all the components, a system will have healthful feedback mechanisms that will prevent it from being poor for very long.

Time will be needed. Since computers emerged on the national scene in the early 1950's, rapid strides have been made. They have had tardy entry into resource management except as data analysers and payroll handlers. Time will be needed for wildland managers to "get with it." Time is also needed even for those who are "with it" to develop systems and to get them functional. Time is needed to take developments in other fields and apply them to our problems, to adopt them, to de-bug them, and to learn how to use the answers effectively.

Objectives, desired outputs, are extremely difficult to define. We will solve many unreal problems, answer many unasked or irrelevant questions in our stumbling development.

You know as well as I that wildlife problems have not been formulated clearly and are often stated in such vague terms that any approach to mathematical or objective treatment has been hopeless. This will continue to be a limitation, but one I am confident we can overcome when we see the reasons for doing so.

Another limitation is that we have very limited empirical data on which to begin building a rigorous predictive theory. This limitation can be overcome when we see that all the data can be handled and analyzed. We can even run analyses to see which data contribute the most to decisions and concentrate on these, dropping behind the unused and nice-to-know that now fills our files.

Suboptimization is a persistent problem. We will have to develop new techniques for determining if we are on a hill or saddle and have not gained the peak.

As in the military, we will try to squeeze in events of low probability. We must stick to the principle that the fundamental mission of the system must not be jeopardized in order to accommodate events of extremely low probability.

As increased centralization of administrative function and decision occurs, some personnel problems such as on refuges will emerge. Wisdom will be needed to show employees how the system can allow them to be more human, how it can be used to better achieve human goals, how it can free them to expand and develop their interests and talents. You and I can make the system "take over." It can become our impersonal executor but in the subjugation of our men and women, there will be a loss over the long run. Given an opportunity to expand people's humanity, the systems approach can be the most significant development ever to occur in resource management.

Go to the top.

This Web site is maintained by R. H. Giles, Jr.
Send an email message - Questions, revisions?
Entered: December 23, 2002.