There is probably no more broad topic than wildlife management when it is viewed as I do. It embraces everything in the world; everything seems to have influenced or to have been influenced by it.

Wildlife itself is an important actual and potential resource. It needs management, but it is not getting the amount or quality it and people dependent upon it needs. Some people see only progress made in wildlife management over about 50 years. Others, of which I am one, tend to see the unmet needs, the losses, and the opportunities. There is no easy "proof" of need. Failures, when there are no standards or criteria, are impossible to discuss. There may be insights provided to readers about the present and future needs and about alternative ways to deal with them. The present wildlife system is in a stupor, held there by a federal agency with a low budget and conservative state agencies only taking low risks typical of the mental and fiscal constraints of government service. There are plenty of reasons for the present situation. Gilbert and Dodds (1992) provided a thoughtful and comprehensive history of the present condition. Herein, though, I outline what I believe are the elements of one or more "centers" or comprehensive programs in modern wildlife management. The definition will be dodged here, but the scope and concepts will likely become evident within the topics addressed.

To describe a comprehensive program in wildlife management I must embrace a very large number of topics, but I think this is necessary. The topics must include far more than conventional ideas of wildlife biology or even of wildlife ecology. They must include at least the massively complex topics of energy, economics, esthetics, and enforcement.

This chapter attempts to describe a whole system that needs to be created. It should be very broad in scope and deal effectively with the interactive triad of wildlife populations, multidimensional faunal space, and people. It must deal with education and information transfer, with research, and include a service and operational function. It must deal with both macro- and micro-levels of management. These topics may appear to be too inclusive, but all must be included if a whole viable program is to be created to meet a rising tide of wildlife resource needs.

This chapter is not the best medium for recounting the problems of wildlife resources. They are fairly well known but, in summary, the key ones include:

1. Changing land use and reduced habitats for animals.
2. Lack of adequate knowledge to mange many species
3. Population losses to pesticides and pollution
4. Changing public preference for game and resource use techniques
5. Increasing urbanization and loss of attachment to and knowledge about wildlife
6. Species endangerment and loss, world-wide
7. Introductions of exotics
8. Increases in some wildlife which result in them becoming disease-carrying and pest species
9. Losses in some species changing demand-supply imbalances and local economic hardship
10. Conflicts in appropriate state or federal responsibilities for some populations

The program proposed herein will not solve all of these problems, but it is proposed to assist in making a rapid, strategic assault on them. It cannot match or re-do the efforts of wildlife agencies across the country. It has no regulatory authority. It seeks to describe a unique set of functions that can meet the perceived needs from one or more small centers of excellence where:

1. High administrative efficiency can be gained;
2. Interactive, synergistic results can be produced through planning;
3. High cost-effectiveness can be gained by attention to goals and objectives and persistent feedback;
4. Past experience and established successes can be utilized;
5. Program diversity can be acquired;
6. A cadre of unique leaders can be created to move problems out of the way;
7. Standards of excellence and cost-effective wildlife management can be set for other schools, agencies, and managers;
8. Service, not otherwise available, can be delivered from centralized, cost-effective resources;
9. Information use and transfer into practice can be assured; and
10. National and international interest in and experience in managing wildlife can be integrated while there is yet time for some species to regain viable population levels.

The two levels of need stated above are only gray images of the red, felt-needs for improved wildlife management. It is conspicuously clear to me that management can be done better than at present and that the present educational system is slow, incapable of change in rate or methods. Research results, new practices and not always published and when they are, are only slowly brought to the field. Services of a wide variety are needed and are foregone due to insufficient knowledge of its availability, or high costs because of insufficient scale of operations. All of these are needs being addressed in this proposal.

The Program

The program is broad in scope, with no parts that must be invented or discovered for it to succeed. It requires a sizable investment because it must be large enough and powerful enough to escape the "gravity-fields" of present wildlife management programs. It needs more than a little of this, a little of that, a simple fix. It must be long-term enough to attract appropriate staff and students and must be well-funded so that creative efforts may be into program development rather than continual fund-raising. A program is now conceived; environments and the leadership is available; the field spaces are available; the national and international contacts are known. The program can be profitable, at least break-even. All of the parts of the program are necessary and independent. First, the educational part of the program will be described.

Education

The major portions of the imagined educational plan are as follows:

1. Extensive recruitment in U.S. and English-speaking countries to secure highly-motivated high school graduates. The education program begins in the summer of the year following graduation. A class of 60 is recruited.
2. A dormitory environment is provided and includes weekly seminars, tutorials, efforts to test out of courses, to achieve advanced placement, and to achieve unusual levels of understanding and knowledge within a newly-created curriculum. High emphasis is placed on self-learning media, computer-assisted instruction, and abundant alternative learning media. In this environment, social and communication skills are developed. Life-long friendship and professional support is a planned consequence.
3. An optimal learning environment (Giles 1963, Giles and Huffman 1973) is created and utilized actively.
4. Extensive field experiences are provided throughout the program, including a U.S. trip in the summer of the sophomore year, a European and African trip in the junior year. Three field stations, one a forested mountain, another a coastal wetland, and other a grassland are field laboratories.
5. Workshops and training sessions are offered to agency and private wildlife managers. These sessions include students and a planned, phased system of employee records, competency progress, and acknowledged contributions to student knowledge from visitors.
6. Attention is given to (a) physical fitness; (b) leadership training in practical situations (e.g., fire fighting); (c) law violator apprehensions; (d) work experience (including computers, engines, mules, and shovels); and (e) small-group action and diplomacy.
7. Educational work includes creating educational units for future students under the concept of "we learn well that which we must teach."
8. Systems for computer-managed instruction will be employed, allowing students phased, self-paced instruction.
9. Continual physiological and psychological monitoring will allow personal and program evaluations.
10. Continuous work during a 5-year period will result in the average student securing a bona fide university education, the pride of working in this program, and special knowledge for doing modern wildlife management.
11. Employment for these graduates is perceived to be from graduates of the program itself in a ancillary diverse enterprise that "does wildlife management" Typically after 1-2 years in the enterprise, graduates will enter a graduate program in which managerial oriented projects are developed. Not basic research, these projects are strongly related to estimates of cost effectiveness, of testing options, and developing useful computer systems to improve field work and decisions.
    The graduate student is typically supported by the enterprise; the thesis is the delivered product; and an agreed apprenticeship of one year is the time in which the research results get built into enterprise operation; are published, and are marketed. The results are a self-adapting enterprise growing, on the cutting edge, providing opportunities for superior, dedicated managers and all the while working for the wildlife resource, "the company," and, of course, for self interests.

Service

Currently many wildlife agencies do not use modern technology for many reasons. One perception underlying the proposed program is that if a service facility, a working enterprise or organization is available, use would be made of it. For example, computer analyses of data, food habits analyses, assistance in research design, production of computer maps of refuges, and selection of optimum placement of workers.

There are often needs for an independent analysis or for unbiased reports and testimony. The program would supply service to wildlife resource agencies and managers. Students would benefit from assisting on such projects, costs would be reduced, requests not adequately addressed may be formulated as research and development projects, information may be gained from the requesters, and, most importantly, modern technology and knowledge may be taken more rapidly to the field.

Users of services may see fit to employ certain students they have contacted in the service-providing relationship. Certain users may wish to contribute to the overall program, to benefit not only the program but its potentials for meeting their future service needs.

Building a Knowledge Base

As for performing service, a central research facility or study of knowledge-base-building has the advantages of:

1. Reducing lag time in obtaining results;
2. Reducing administrative and contractual difficulties;
3. Avoiding constraints of certain personnel ceiling; and
4. Avoiding piece-meal research that is costly, often wasteful, and usually difficult to integrate into ongoing field activities.

Research is interpreted broadly and includes: (l) directed fundamental research, (2) descriptive and enumerative research, (3) experimentation, (4) model building, (5) inventory, (6) management information and managerial systems development, (7) monitoring and feedback, and (8) summary and reviews.

Research is conducted by a team of staff researchers of the program and as part of the University graduate program by graduate fellows, research associates, and post-doctoral fellows.

An example of a research prospectus from the program to an agency is as follows:

A Project Prospectus

The primary project objective is to design and create a general purpose, functional decision-aiding system for managing special places for wildlife.

The secondary objectives are:

1. To create a system for analyzing the need for and gauging the desirability of a designated land area for acquisition or control and disposition.
   1. To create a inventory of wildlife areas and related land uses.
   2. To determine land acquisition by which an agency's objectives can be met.
   3. To create a computer-based system by which the inventory can be used and the analysis repeated as objectives, priorities, and conditions change.
2. To create a computer system for use for optimally allocating the fixed, fiscal year budgets among special areas.
3. To create a computer-based probabilistic model by which area managers, with their advisors, may optimally allocate whatever funds that are available for investigative or research purposes on their areas.
4. To create a system through which optimal patrol strategies and manpower deployment decisions can be made for law enforcement.
5. To develop fundamental knowledge and a computer-based methodology for use by personnel in optimally allocating patrol time and procedures, education, deterrent force, and legal action on or adjacent to Refuges.
6. To create a general purpose land-use guidance system that allows:
   1. assessing impacts of proposed land-use change,
   2. assessing and predicting impacts of proposed pesticide or other pollutants to refuge environments, and
   3. making optimal selection from among land-use change alternatives (management practices) on wildlife areas.
7. To create a net-energy-based geographic information system that can be used with a land-use guidance system for any wildlife area. The system will integrate objectives, ecological and economic factors, net energetics, and present decision makers with aids for prospective decisions.
8. To create a transfer system to assure the results of these projects becoming available to and applied on wildlife areas and adjacent lands.

The projects outlined are not overly ambitious because some parts of the systems have been created, have research momentum, have interactive and synergistic work now in progress.

Most projects are conceived as master and Ph.D. candidate work. Some can be done by part- and full-time programmers. Most require significant use of the literature and agency documents. Many require synthesis of existing programs.

Computer-based systems now exist or need to be developed within the program to achieve the following types of reports, theses, dissertations, and "packages" to be used at national, regional, or area levels. The following titles suggest the work needed to achieve the above objectives.

1. Acquisition and Disposition
   1. Spatial Analysis of Existing and Proposed Refuges
   2. Representative Biological Provinces and the Refuge Concept
   3. Waterfowl Flight and Feeding Behavior Relative to Refuges
   4. "Short-Stopping": An Analysis and Proposed Solution
   5. An Optimal Refuge Dispersal Pattern: A Covering-Problem Approach
   6. Cost Expectations for Existing and Proposed Refuges: Acquisition of Land and its Associated Costs
   7. The Relations of Refuge Lands to Other Public Lands
   8. An Algorithm Using Biodiversity and Other Criteria for Acquiring or Disposing of Refuges and Support Areas
2. Annual Budget Allocation
   1. Applications of MAST (Division of Federal Aid) to Wildlife System Budget Allocation
   2. Relations of National, Regional, and Other Allocation of Budgets to Refuges
   3. Alternatives to MAST or its later versions
   4. Refuge Production Functions (Ecological Succession and State Transition Models)
   5. Demand Analyses for Refuge Outputs
   6. Sensitivity of Cost Estimates
   7. Land-Use Inventory and Computer Mapping of National Refuges
   8. Refuge Support Potential: Threatened and Endangered Species
   9. Carrying Capacity Estimates
   10. Automated Species Inventories for Refuges
3. Research Funds Allocation
   1. The Role of Simulation in Allocating Limited Research Funds
   2. A Multi-Objective, Probabilistic Approach to Allocating Funds for Refuge Research
   3. Transfer Efficiency for Refuge Research: Discovery to Application
   4. Game Theory Applied to Refuge Research Allocation
4. Law Enforcement Effectiveness
   1. Violation Probabilities Among Refuge Users: The Scope of Refuge Crime
   2. Optimum Distribution of Enforcement Agents
   3. Optimum Patrol and Search Strategies
   4. Optimum Agent Selection
   5. Citizen Inputs to Law Enforcement Systems
   6. Poaching as a Population Mortality Factor
   7. Deterrence: Its Effect and Importance
5. Land Use Guidance System
   1. Energetic Functions for Refuges
   2. Land Use Models of Net Energy
   3. Energy Costs of Management
   4. GUIDE: A Watershed Management System Based on Net Energetics
   5. Sensitivity Analyses of Guide
   6. Feedback Functions for Guide
   7. Automated Environmental Assessment
   8. An Automated EIS "Skeleton"
   9. A Review of Relevant Research Transfer Options

The above is presented as an example of the type and scope of research or knowledge base creating a program that would be interactive with the educational and service dimensions of the overall program in contemporary wildlife management. Examples of other research programs would be:

1. Law Enforcement Effectiveness,
2. Faunal Damage (vs. Injury) Management Strategies,
3. Educational Effectiveness,
4. Influences of International Policy and Practices on U.S. Wildlife Management,
5. Exportation of Wildlife Management Knowledge to Developing Countries,
6. Development of Birdwatching as a National Pastime,
7. Optimization Systems for Farm, Ranch, and Forest Wildlife, and
8. National Deer Management Status Assessment: Costs, Benefits, and Baseline Trends,
9. The Illusive Benefit Unit: Theory and Practice of Wildlife Economics,
10. Prescriptive Aids to Reducing Chemical Hazards to Wildlife in the U.S.

Extensive activities with land use data banks, computer mapping, EIS, and related projects would be engaged.

University-level international offices can coordinate transfer of knowledge - two ways - among wildlife areas around the world.

How these capabilities will be utilized include:

1. Formation of a small local enterprise with a faculty advisory board
2. Development of a project staff and an ad hoc group of consultants
3. Development of marketing materials
4. Development of contracts and solicitation of stock holders and supporters.

In general the capabilities within the overall program include:

1. Planned research
2. Research direction and leadership
3. Expert teams of faculty and students
4. Significant inputs and overview by a respected committee
5. Emphasis on software and decision-aid subsystems, all of which will be integrated
6. Efficient land-related data collection and inventory
7. Multi-level response to national, regional, and international decision makers
8. Publication, education, and technology transfer
9. Unique, highly efficient, centralized approach to serving the entire wildlife management field.