Species-Specific Management (SSM)

Feedback

Goals and objectives are difficult to formulate but they are the standards or basis for feedback. Feedback means that set of checking, correcting, adjusting, and adapting actions that move a system closer and closer to the desired condition. Some people claim that the failures and limitations in wildlife resource management is that there has been little feedback. (One reason is that desired end conditions have been so poorly stated.)

Herein, we generalize, suggesting that feedback can be applied:

• To the goals and objectives themselves, the desired end conditions, making them more precise, testing them against changes, and developing measures that relate well to the intent. In some cases they are too general; in some cases, the stated precision cannot be achieved due to costs and local conditions. Often "more animals", an apparent "wildlife" objective is incorrect and needs to be replaced by recreational quality-weighted person-hours, reduced losses, or a set of weighted goals or objectives assigned by each resource-user-group. Often the objectives need to be expressed in terms of gains per unit cost.
• To the inputs, adding to or reducing them based on sampling design, improving the storage and retrieval, making them more precise (or reducing precision when it is found unnecessary or excessively costly), and assuring their safe storage. Improved retirement or "exit" interviews and observations from field experts need to be well handled. Inputs include funds as well as ideas, person hours, research findings, fertilizers, water, and energy ... all to be known and better predicted and adjusted for the future species-specific resource system.
• To the processes, improving on the cost-effectiveness of the actions taken in the field. Improving sampling, analyses, reporting, transportation ... if necessary... are parts of the feedback to be applied to system processes.
• To feedforward, improving models and making efficient adjustments in the present, based on the predictions and estimates about the future.
• To feedback itself, altering the standard setting, the sensing of current conditions, the comparisons, and/or the response that changes the current system ... all reducing the difference between the desired species resource condition and the actual one.

  Feedback may vary for each species and setting. It requires continual effort to control a dynamic animal species system, one that is often veering "off-track" not producing desired benefits due to other species, weather, budget changes, catastrophes, changing land uses, and unknown causes.

  For example, considering feedback for the black-billed cuckoo (Coccyzus erythropthalmus) the relative success of a management plan can be obtained from recorded observations of the birds. Records (improved by using standard routes and times and trained or experienced observers) allow the manager of an area to note changes that have taken place in the population density since initiating work. For example, if increased numbers of cuckoos is the desired goal and the number of observations has increased, it can be concluded that the management plan is currently successful. Feedback may be applied to achieve the same numbers at lower costs. These birds winter in Venezuela and Columbia. Management work and encouragement is needed there as well as on the summer range. Managers may not be able to bring enough resources to bear to achieve desired population or user levels if species are migratory. Adjustments in the plan and work now may be needed if predictable ecological changes or developments will not benefit the bird or potential users. Such adjustment are feedforward .

Often used to mean a simple reply to a message or idea, feedback herein means much more than this. It is itself a corrective, adaptive system working on improving a system. Improving ... as compared to what? The species-specific objectives!

Submitted by Robert H. Giles, Jr.

A contribution from a project funded in part by US Forest Service, Dr. Mike Rauscher, the Southern Appalachian Forest Hypertext Enclclopedia project, 2002

This Web site is maintained by R. H. Giles, Jr.
Last revision July 10, 2002.