Rural System's

Modern Wild Faunal Resource System Management

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The Place of Natural History in Wildlife Management

Lecture notes for a wildlife management class at Virginia Tech, April, 2003

• Everything in wildlife management is either analysis or design. You take things apart or put them together. To be effective, you must do both. Natural history is largely descriptive or analysis.
• Because you start your career with natural history does not mean that you must end there.
• Natural history must include all things "natural" including plants, geology, climate, all aspects of " The Fishery," snakes, toads, frogs, lizards, birds, mammals, mollusks (particularly the land snails), crustaceans, the insects, arachnids, and all of the soil organisms including the hyporheic ones.
• It is silly to think that any person can master 1,000 large organisms, 2,000 plants, and 20,000 invertebrate-like creatures common on a Virginia wildlife refuge or management area.
• We must try, but we need a team approach and specialists, and recruitment of others.
• Each species has one and usually more life stages. "Species" is the wrong category. We need to study and think of managing life groups. There is greater difference, for example, between a wild turkey poult and an adult than between many genera.
• Species-specific, and better-yet life-group specific work must begin afresh with computer help. It cannot be done without it for there are too many units, too many locations (GIS is essential), and all changing over time.
• Wildlife managers have to know the life groups and their essential major behaviors so that they can take action to change the abundance - increase, stabilize, or decrease it.
• Managers have to know the relative value of each life group to the publics for which they work so that the benefits can be increased by their actions ... for the lowest possible costs.
• Managers who claim to " do ecology" and cannot even name the species with which they work look silly, and are reasonably treated as if they are.
• There are vast areas of this state, certainly of the US, that have not been surveyed, not studied just in order to list the species! Richness is not diversity (even though some think they are synonymous).
• In court, the manager must be ready to assert that, under the law, he/she has achieved some stated level of biodiversity. On guard!
• We need old fashioned " natural history" but done in a new way. Society will not pay you for the hours spent that made up the old reports. Each observation costs too much (travel, labor, equipment, data storage, data analysis, data retrieval). (There is little evidence that the results are paying off, something that managers need to change.)
• We need planned observations, new Internet recording of observations (NatureSeen), new uses of GIS to direct area-proportional and time-proportional sampling, new use of night-vision technology, and new team " expeditions" not unlike those early ones about which we read into " darkest Africa."
• The place now? Not much, badly needed, greatly improved, and directed to specific uses and payoffs. You must plan to " present in court."
• The place in the future? A new service-based resource of the wildlands as described in Nature Folks a proposed enterprise of Rural System.

Robert H. Giles, Jr., PhD Professor Emeritus, College of Natural Resources Virginia Tech Blacksburg, Virginia 24060 (RHGiles@RuralSystem.com) 2003

See Herman, S.G. 2002. Wildlife biology and natural history: time for a reunion, J. Wildlife Manage. 66(4): 933-946

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January 17, 2003.