Sustained forests; sustained profits
Sustained forests; sustained profits
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Recounting some of the early stresses and losses encountered within the wildlife world of data bases and information systems, the speaker maintains that the work is good and has been done for the right reasons. He attempts to encourage and support the current work but suggests an unusual view of work to enhance progress in foreign lands, stressing the importance of local peoples' efforts. Special efforts he suggests include:
This presentation is available as http://fwie.fw.vt.edu/rhgiles/Lastingforests/tahoe.htm
Thank you for the invitation to talk to you. A few years ago I gave a banquet talk to a Wildlife Society Chapter and it was published two years later and cost me personally $400. I heard from one reader. This year I won't go near the Bulletin or Fisheries and this talk is already on the web waiting for you. Don't take notes; think along with me.
Things change rapidly it seems. As a youth I had bad dreams and a fear of being carried off by gypsies. Now I fear that I will not be carried off by them.
My career has been one of watching slow change over 55 years. It has occurred, but it has been like watching grass grow. With grass, I knew the final form to expect. With watching the rise of computer applications in wildlife management, I knew what I wanted for the future but I merely pleaded for its life. Buffington analyzed big game harvest records in Idaho in 1967. The data processing time then was so slow that results could not be gotten in time to improve any decisions about next year's seasons. (I'm not sure if that has changed.) South Carolina took but ignored our system for analyzing law enforcement violations. A group of states ignored the potentials for improved allocation of law enforcement agents. Virginia ignored our regionalization programs and offers for deer harvest analyses. A PhD analysis of the data needs of the Refuge System was ignored. A statewide GIS (in 1975) was swept out of existence, then revived 7 years later into what is now a leader. A powerline location and impact analysis was put on the shelf ... as if there is feed and life-giving nutrients on any shelf. A GIS for the eastern coal fields was not renewed ... but they now tell me that they want one and can use the soil, precipitation, temperature and other components that we had developed. This is a tale of pain, strife, and struggle. Small successes and deep depressions have been the trend, and I suspect the future may be like that. I've painted plenty of pictures about the future and I have been more successful than I have any right to be. I have stayed gloomy because the rate of progress has been so slow. I just wanted to help bring computer applications into wildlife resource management decision making. The technological rate has been great; the acceptance rate very slow, and thus the benefits that have been available have not been received. There are 250 people here today out of 9,000 professional wildlifers ... and some of you are skeptics! Acceptance of computers and their applications is by people, not machines. There is still a great distance to go, but I am excited by the progress and as an early-adapter, when the youth pill comes, I'll be ready to go around again. This time I'll do it a little differently and that's what I'd like to talk about. Don't despair. There will be failures, and things will go ever so slowly, but things will change and the change can be for the better, and many of you have seen them do so. Some of the things I'll mention may already be being done. Maybe I just have to encourage and support them. Others may be new. A few may be controversial ... but maybe those are the ones that will only develop after you are gray and you too have retired. It has been a good fight, and I still think it was for the right reason, and here's what I want to work with you on next.
The World
I once thought that wildlife management here in the States was pretty good and that if I could work with international students, substantial change might occur in the wildlife resource field elsewhere. I figured that 1 percent improvement here was insignificant compared to 1 percent improvement in another country with major wildlife resource management problems. I was right about the problems; wrong about the influence. The improvements have to come from the people of the country so training and education of people is essential. They have to return to a structure into which they fit and from which they can work their new-found wonders. Finding the right person, assuring that they return, and assuring the structure into which they can work are three improbable events. I went to Nigeria and found most of the wildlife of northern Nigeria has already disappeared. Lake Chad, the southern destination of most European migrating birds is being dried up by US and other countries' expenditures on dams in the rivers that feed that large lake.
The rich wildlife resources of India are threatened on all sides by pollution and agricultural and urban expansions. There is no unified theory of management among a menage of research field-biologists competing for limited funds. Senegal has 16 competing political parties and is supported by aid funds from many countries. Grazing by migrating herds of livestock contributes to desertification and loss of re-planted forests. Major wildlife persists in only a few areas and they are now developing a program to re-introduce elephants into a marginal habitat (overrun with buffalo since there are now few lions, the only means of control there) and an unchanged sociopolitical environment. I visited China, and it, like these other countries, has major managerial needs. After a week of lectures there on a systems approach to wildlife management, I was asked "just what species do you want to study?" Well- translated, I am sure, I had not gotten across my message. Not one animal; not even "to study." The message had been that we must create systems, whole decision-oriented, output-oriented systems, and information is only one part. Inputs for decisions come from studies and research and observations, and they must go into a system, but those systems must be designed help make hard decisions about how animals can be protected and produced or controlled. They must also be used to meet a host of conflicting objectives, cost effectively. We can do that; we must increase our work in this area. When we get it right, maybe we can export it to other countries. We can help, but we cannot do it for the people or for the wildlife of other countries.
The GIS
I have a concept of the Alpha Unit. It's nothing more to most of you than a Landsat pixel, 30 meters by 30 meters. To me it is the spatial unit where resources ought to be modeled. It is a volume, a column 1 km deep and 1 km above the mapped pixel surface. It has over 200 "maps" stored for it; it includes time; it is where ecological modeling is done. It contains human data from the Census Bureau and elsewhere. It has loaded into it, not only the data about it, but it has data about nearby cells. (So what if a pixel does not have water present? For most wildlife, won't water in a nearby pixel meet life requirements?) Animals and plants live in volumes, not just areas. I'm convinced that we should go to this scale for most wildlife work (we do not have the time or luxury of overly large budgets to discuss the exceptions, much less acquire them). We can aggregate upward if essential. At this scale, Landsat images are now available and most fisheries and megafaunal analyses can be done cost effectively.
The Alpha Units are special. They are always changing and their major reason for being is that they finally express the resource benefit unit. Most of us struggle with the input factors, the independent variables. We can now get to, we must get to the potential resource benefit units. They express deer, elk, pounds of fish, gallons of runoff, and esthetic-unit scores. All of these are changing. I call the change transition, not unlike ecological succession, but succession has so many definitions, nuances, and special conditions (especially related to plants) that I do not want to fool with it any longer. Transitions may appear as stairsteps, broken-line images of rapid declines and abrupt increases. I'm tired of the academic debate about continuous succession. It is time to compute expected objectives as they may be achieved from the land and then achieving them and engaging their constraints.
Aspect (the direction downhill), without a transformation, is almost meaningless. We are working on a paper that suggests 3 aspect classes after transformations. Northerly-southerly aspect, Type I, is an expression of solar phenomena or lack of them (as in the deep mountain shadows of the late afternoon. Easterly-Westerly, Type II, may have a solar component, but the phenomena at work are probably non-solar and largely coastal, continental, airmass, and anthropogenic. Melding these two types into one "ecological variable" is mathematical, statistical, and ecological madness that needs to end. (Consider entering 355 degrees for one slope, 5 degrees for another. For practical field work, they have the same aspect! Imagine what will be done as these numbers are squared and otherwise massaged in a regression analysis.) Flat is a condition of indeterminate aspect but also zero slope and is called Type III. It needs to be coded as a separate variable (neigher slope nor aspect) for analyses. These are technical issues but they suggest the improvements that can be made in data acquisition, maintenance, and statistical analyses for modeling that are now possible and needed.
Alpha Units rarely have linear features. Actual land slopes (percent or degree) probably need to be transformed to slope steepness related to erosion potential for some analyses. For other analyses, perhaps only two classes are needed (e.g., less than 40 percent and greater than that for wild turkeys). Slopes (as an example) need to be transformed in some way so that when they are entered into regression analyses software, results might have some meaning.
There are few important ecological variables that must be gotten from the field and most variables now used in models are derived from a few key variables. Margaret Trani and I discuss this in Environmental Management (23:(2):477-481). There are 6 variables mappable in the GIS from which more than 24 different expressions of landscape pattern can be derived. They are: area, classes, proportion of the dominant class, number of polygons, polygon size variance, and elevation range. I believe that similar analyses for things other than landscape pattern will also be shown to be derivative of a few factors in the GIS. I also believe that about any 7 major mapped factors will usually give more discrimination on a map than the average manager known how to use to refine a managerial decision for a resource. The quest is for the 5 to 7 key variables. Elevation within Alpha Units (as obtained from DEMS or their equivalents) is one such variable and from it about 20 other variables can be derived or developed. Latitude and elevation open the door to models for all of the ecological relations of radiant energy for plants and animals. We've hardly begun to comprehend the influences of several lunar forces within our ecosystems.
The Field Person
I only imagine the field person reviewing objectives from a web site, studying in the office the results of GIS work and alpha unit analyses, then with this land use intelligence he or she would select the choice sites usually near roads that meet certain criteria (perhaps 10-12). He or she would then go to the site with a GPS, locate a point, use a hand-held computer running software and GIS created images and maps from a CD-ROM, load a few observations into the computer to get forestry or range data, then revise the site index equations before moving off to the next stop. This we can do today but it sounds like "future" to some people. So what?! The wonders of the computer seem to exceed our knowledge of what to do with the results. Our minds are full of data, formats, storage capacities, and we haven't re-defined or made operational what we mean by land health. We have not clarified sustained "stuff"; or even replaced carrying capacity or harvestable surplus. We keep using the well-refuted "maximum sustained yield" language as if it had meaning to daily decisions on the land.
I advanced (with colleagues) the concept of the rationally robust (Giles, R. H., R. G. Oderwald, and A. U. Ezealor. 1993. Toward a rationally robust paradigm for agroforestry systems. Agroforestry Systems 24:21-37). Some of the key points are worth highlighting. We within our type of work, have to get away from the statistical confidence level of alpha being 0.05 or the so-called 5% level. This is too stringent a test among things intrinsically variable and, with few exceptions, few fatal consequences of a poor decision. The 0.15 is more realistic and reduces our costs to one fourth those of the present. Sampling needs to take the power of the GIS and do area-proportional work. Expert opinion needs to be formalized with the beta estimate (where a is maximum, b is most likely, and c is minimum, then the useful estimate is
k= (a + 4b + c)/6).
My former graduate students (McComb and Klopfer) have recently used logistic regression to model the probability of certain trees, salamanders, and mammals being within Alpha Units. Ecologically these new maps are of great interest but we must push ahead to convert them to potential human resource benefit maps. These become maps for prescription reforestation, for protecting and acquiring select tracts of land, and for developing tours and trips to observe certain species. Unmistakable, these are maps that revolutionize sampling. Down with random sampling in the wildlands! Up with "supervised classification" (as used in remote sensing) and then taking a number of samples that are proportional to the area of cells of set probability.
Human Data Bases
Resources are for people. Benefits can only be perceived by people. Not to have people within wildlife data bases is an old desire of mine, a failure I could not overcome. Imagine spending money to increase wildlife law enforcement efforts in an area having an increasing population. The arrests would increase, not decrease, with every expenditure of effort! Imagine being an officer in a declining population area. You may not be able to "buy" an arrest (if that is your agency's flawed concept of success). These data bases need to be used to express people affected, people in a viewshed, relative financial welfare, probability of participating in a resource use, probable weights assigned to select objectives, demands for select opportunities, and probability of fires and losses related to animals.
Integrated Vertebrate Damage Management
We have to move into the pest arena. The people there have real needs, there are few prior applications, and the needs are great for GIS, models, data bases, inventory, and optimization. We have to continue to discuss the needs to control damage not necessarily the animals themselves. We have to assist in building the systems that allow the manipulation the the populations, the habitats, and even more importantly the people themselves. There are crises ahead in pests and disease damage that will require super efforts. Failure to bring deer under control has reached substantial risk levels for agencies as well as managers ... but because people themselves have been put at risk. This is no laughing matter, nothing for "someone else", and the separatists policies of the past will not work. The boat is sinking, and we are all in it. The people here at this meeting have tools and philosophies that can be of assistance from pointing to effective attack sites; locating probable dens; selecting areas for deputized animal removals; selecting where disease vectors are likely; estimating impacts of deer on threatened species; predicting erosion from excessive big game populations; and mapping select grains where pest attacks are most likely. Resource benefits is a nice phrase but it has to become expected net benefits. "Pests " is another word for costs. We have to work with the benefits and the costs, to achieve the net benefits.
Regions
I once thought that a detailed raster map of the US was possible, one at the Alpha Unit scale. Perhaps it is somewhere, but I have my doubts. I once thought a regional data base might be possible but I doubt it. The rates of change in the land features are too rapid, but not as rapid as the personnel changes that will prevent it being created...or kill it. I'm not sure a statewide data base can be preserved. I do know, that if landscape ecology has any meaning at all, we have to get data from a state and all surrounding contiguous states into the same data base. In Virginia, for example, with its long border, none of the wildlife data from any counties on the border make much sense because we have no data about what is occurring (e.g., in game harvests) in the adjacent counties. People, activity, economics, laws and regulations, enforcement ... all influence a county and reports about its harvests, and other gains and losses. These are phenomena of adjacent counties and not to have some level of knowledge (statistical control) of these cannot persist. There is a need for each state to form coalitions with all adjacent states and trade data about adjacent counties. At least county data, but hopefully, eventually, all data are needed to make the GIS process work and to enlarge the picture so that the black edges around all images of counties and states do not symbolize the edge of the known wildlife resource world.
The Enterprise
There are many alternative wildlife managements. I once thought there was only one and we were all studying and working from the same pages. We are not! The alternative on which I am working is being described in my Essentials (at http://fwie.fw.vt.edu/rhgiles/essentials/index.htm). I have been myopic all of my life. I have never assimilated that I have worked for a minority, the hunter, and they are only about 11-12 percent of the population. They cannot vote their way out of town! I have been so insignificant (along with my colleagues) that few hunters know about wildlife management. The rest of the population does not even know that it exists. I see a new world ahead and some of it is occurring now: reduced license sales; reduced hunters; stable anglers, major land development conflicts with associated political agency threats, increasing urbanites, increasing disrespect (if not open lawlessness) for regulations, and a looming fossil fuel shortage. I see a person behind the agency steering wheel and all I can do is yell:WE ARE GOING TO CRASH! They are paralyzed and cannot even take their foot off the gas.
My new image is the football analogy. Wild animals are to the wildlife resource as the football is to the football industry. The football is irrelevant! The industry is advertising, food, drink, uniforms, stadia, travel, etc. The leather thing in the middle of the field is irrelevant. We have kept our eye on the ball too long. My view is that when the wildlife resource is seen as the basis for a multi-million dollar industry, then it will be preserved and protected and managed. New levels of management will be required; new data bases, new models, new programs. Sophisticated marketing (contra conservation education), competitive hiring, bonuses and incentives for superior and innovative work ... all seem part of the new enterprise. "Cost- effectiveness" rather than "plead-for-a-budget-and-spend-to-the-level" might become the order of the day.
Where is the money that might support such an activity? It is easy to see when we stop looking directly at the animals. Clothing, equipment, tours, intensified rangeland and forest management, security, pest control, knowledge-based services, software, information delivery, games, adventures and catered outings, guide services, single and multi-topic US and international tours, foundations, research, new sports of animal watching, signs, bird houses and feeders, specialty equipment, memberships, and association services for all of the above. Of course the traditional elements (hunting, fishing, trapping and their associated products, services, leases, etc. ) remain but I have not mentioned them, partially to try to be convincing about the potentials. The new wildlife management will be profit-driven for that is the national paradigm and it will increase, not decrease. Tax support will diminish. There will remain needs for inspection and oversight but not the direct involvement of tax-subsidized conventional resource managers of agencies. They will work for the enterprise(s). Law enforcement will pale as the enterprises take over protection of "their" sources of profit. Extension no longer will plead for acceptance of practices since acceptance can be tied to meaningful financial returns, not merely good feelings. The successful enterprise will require more and higher levels of knowledge of animals and plants, more economics and ecology, more energetics, more thoughtfully-directed studies, and more profound computer applications leading to meaningful simulations unified with optimization than presently dreamed. The wildlife manager will do it ... or the enterprise will find someone who can.
Land Associations
A much-discussed problem in forestry is that of the non-industrial private forest land owner and why he or she does not accept good forestry practices. I stood on my 20 acres and thought about this problem. "I do not need more forestry or wildlife knowledge. I am not practicing what I know!" Then I answered, why? I do not have the time or money and, besides, my tract is to small for any meaningful practices, all of which require some type of rotation or involve a series of transitions in vegetation and usefulness to different types of animals. I am too small! Only in the context of planned profit-sharing among an association of landowners can I engage in meaningful land use. Everyone will not join; there are plenty of diverse objective out there. So be it. There is work aplenty among those who will join the enterprise. When the enterprise starts paying the increasing land taxes and insurance for people and also shows profit, then reluctant landowners will forego some of their lower-weighted and less-well-articulated objectives.
Ranging
Integral to the enterprise and the associations is ranging. You have heard of ecotourism, sightseeing, visiting, outdoor recreation, nature-based tourism, hiking, camping, and watching wildlife. Ranging is all of these. There is more, however, for ranging includes the concept of a regional enterprise that manages land and these activities for private and government owners including intensive rangeland, fisheries, and forest management within a system to produce sustained profits. Profits can be made on land annually while profits are waited for in rest-rotation and long forest rotation schedules. People in a region will pay for uses; outsiders can be (but do not have to be) attracted. Planned, year-around profits can be made under sophisticated management with powerful computer aids. I've not seen it done but I know it can be. I have seen all of the parts and early models suggest the profits. The risks are modest. The risks of continuing wildlife management as I have known and practiced it seem to me to be very high.
The Web
As part of the enterprise concept consider a new enterprise contributing to the total profit-pool of the greater enterprise. I call it Lasting Forests but my concept of the forest is very broad (for can any forest be successful in a declining region?). That enterprise has one element devoted to producing data for commerce, industry, and government; selling studies, selling unique maps, serving impact analysts; selling graphic art (e.g., 3-d maps). It contributes to another unit that sells and produces dynamic plans for land owners (and agencies). Called Guidance, the system maintains area- and owner-specific plans for their access from the web. Password-protected, the plan (some 600 pages) is available as pages, tables, chapters, or totally. It includes GIS maps but a high use is in presenting data from such maps in a readable and attractive form. Another unit serves landowners interested in gaining certification of its forests under Smartwood or similar programs of the Rainforest Alliance. (A major need for certification is a well-developed plan such as Guidance.) You will see in the website a design allowing staff to communicate one-to-one with the private land owner to meet his or her specific objectives from the resources of the land, constrained by laws and regulations, informed by ecological models, all unifying the knowledge of the land and its neighbors begins to become the fully-functional, practical decision supporting system for which we have longed. It is now within our grasp. It was 40 years ago ... but now we know more and have more data and faster processors and unbelievable storage, and new wireless communications systems. I do not know whether we will do anything with this decision-making power. I intend to do whatever I can. I may have another 20 years and that ought to count for something. Maybe we can work together. I hope so.
Retired professor of wildlife resource management, Bob came to Va. Tech and has been there for 30 years teaching and working with grad students. He graduated from there with a BS in forestry, stayed for a master's degree in wildlife, worked for the state Game Department, then went to Ohio State University for a Phd. There with Tony Peterle he studied the effects of malathion on the forest ecosystem using radioactive-labeled sulfur in the compound. After that he went to the University of Idaho and taught techniques and big game management. Editor of an ancient version of the Wildlife Society's Techniques Manual, author of a textbook (and 200 other publications), he worked to create a GIS for the state starting in 1968. With students and staff such as Blair Jones, Greg Koeln, and Ann Rasberry he created the Virginia wildlife database called BOVA. He now writes, develops a web site, and teaches a graduate course using the website and email.
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