Rural System's
Modern Wild Faunal Resource System Management
Assignments
In this course, assignments are included at the end of some unit. The assignments listed here on the page before you are the official ones and they need to be completed for satisfactory performance in the course. Intensive thought and changed (or reinforced) behavior is the objective. The grade of the course is based on my perception of the quality of the work submitted for each assignment. That will be posted for you. The final exam is trival evidence (but essential) of that accomplishment. It will count for 20% of the course grade. The list of items in The Contents can be useful. These assignments are usually accomplished by Email letters and reports to Dr. Dave Trauger
and class members.
Citations from internet sources, both websites and listservers, where appropriate, are generally made using the guidelines of the Modern Language Association.
Locate units by clicking on them or find and use them from The Contents.
You may copy or otherwise use any of the elements in his course in your agencies, programs, or related work. You are encouraged to do so and to improve them. Perhaps co-authorship of several papers might be in order. It is important that the work you do during the course does not turn inward, end here.
Assignments ...
The first unit of the course, describes the course and sets the stage for the second unit and those that follow.
You have already completed the first assignment given previously as:
- Read the Preface. (For newcomers to computer use, click twice on the underlined word to be shown that file.) Answer for yourself, (usually by writing in your personal notebook for the course) the questions there. We're not checking ... just do it.
- Read the Introduction to the Course, Student Orientation, and A Letter to Students containing comments about the history of the course and about distance-learning concepts. Complete Assignment 1 listed at the end of the Letter to Students.
Course Description Topics
- Introductions and Course Philosophy - Read the Syllabus, Introduction, Preface, Student Orientation, and Letter to Students and write the email letter (which will be sent at an appointed time) described at the end of Letter to Students. Make notes as assigned in each of these units. Note that a Suggestion Box is available for you to offer editorial and major changes, additions, and links).
- Definition - Memorize and be able to write the definition of faunal resource system management
The Final List - Try to resist linking to this one. It gives away the "story ending", the list of differences between the suggested alternative and currently perceived wildlife management. While resisting, make notes of the differences that that you perceive from your reading or experience. These notes will be useful near the end of the course in an assignment.
- Your Future - Quickly read Your Future in Wildlife Resource Management and answer the question in Introduction which is: Consider a potential conversation about their future with a 14 year old person; a 41 years old person. Write brief notes. Do not submit a response.
- Epistemology - Read On Knowing and memorize the epistemological bases including " place." Email an answer to
- What are the epistemological bases of science?
- Might there be an alternative way to build a knowledge base for the rural or wildland resource system?
[Note that while your answer to item #2 may be "yes", as with other questions in this course, you need to think through and write clearly your best accompanying thought about why or what it might be.]
- Principles - Read and study Working the Triangle on the interplay of wild animal populations, faunal space, and people and conduct the experiment. Make an approximate equilateral triangle on a notebook page, label the conners with the three key topics. Move your pencil or pen from the center to locate where on the triangle you and your abilities and interests primarily lie. If all topics are of equal weight, you will remain at the center; if you are exclusively a "people manager", you will mark that corner. Label your marks. At the end of the course, repeat the exercise. Any Change? Read Principles that struggles with the meaning of "principles" and an arguement for a very brief list. Email me suggestions of principles that I have omitted, given the fairly tight limits I have suggested. Skim the Fundamentals or Principles, a long list for comparison with the above principles and for later reduction or expansion. We have to resolve who we are, how we differ from others, what are distinctions ... and what should be distinctions and differences for the future. Continue thought along this question.
Toward a Theory
- Rear "Toward a Theory"
- Read Managing the Resource and develop a clear definition for yourself, write it in your notes (and continue to define it). Then continue to refine the concept and its relevance to "fauna" for yourself. Do not submit a note.
- Read Toward a Satisfactory Condition, a description of conditions perceived to exist within the current public resource agency; the need to move toward a satisfactory condition. Email me a list of the major components that you perceive as needed by and for which managers may work toward a satisfactory condition. Next, read Advancing Toward a Satisfactory Condition seeking further movement toward an alternative concept of a satisfactory condition.. For the third part of the assignment read Trapping Beavers : The Myth of Natural Resource Decision-Support Systems Leading to the Satisfactory Condition. Continue thought and writing to develop a paper on the satisfactory condition. Do not be frustrated that some (most) of the units of the course do not end conclusively. We are dealing in a new field,"a work in progress" ... and it is dynamic.
- Read and study Ecosystem Management: An Analysis. Write a brief note to me about how you see this relating to a satisfactory condition. Work toward a theory of the satisfactory condition within your own notes.
System Processes
- Read and study each of the following Cross Currents:
a - Select two and refute them; and b- select two and support or improve them (or develop a new one from the list of 32) and send me emails with your three or four responses.
- Read The Role of Subversion in Wildlife Management and send me an email answering : Do the ends ever justify the means? If so, when? What are other strategies to achieve resource-related ends?
Fundamental Faunal System Concepts
- A several-part assignment:
- Skim the Outline of Major Population Ecology Topics, becoming aware of the elements of one aspect of faunal system management. Make no response.
- Skim The Action List to become aware of the decision options available
- Individual Animal Health - Herein wildlife resource management deals with work with populations, rarely with individual animals. Many people remain fixed on veterinary work and on the role of diseases. The overlaps are evident. The emphasis remains, herein, on the population and the resource. A link for pathology and health is provided. Read this note. Do not send a reply.
- Study Variety - Interpreting Issues of Diversity
and Similarity. Analyzing these topics that affect work in populations, faunal spaces and people places them outside of easy classification systems. Be sure that you can calculate a Shannon-Weiner diversity index for Area A with 10 in Life-Group 1, 10
in group 2, and 12 in Group 3; another Area, B, with the same number of creatures but Group 1 with 2, Group 2 with 18 , and Group 3 with 12. Which group has the larger Shannon index? What is the structure that produces a maximum possible index? Send me the answer, then proceed (no response needed) to define richness, explain the possible use of the logarithmic rate in a rank-ordered list of species abundance, and decide when to suggest using a similarity index or (vs) a diversity index. Ask me a question if you need to. Otherwise go to the next assignment.
Systems Work and Decision Making
- Read about A Systems Approach in Forest Faunal Systems
- Read and study:
Memorize the names of the types and know the meaning of the DVES variables. Write to at least one other class member (we share email addresses) and be sure that you are both sure of the type-3 objective and the difference between an objective and a performance measure. Send me a note about the classmember(s) with whom you corresponded.
- Read Beta Estimation Procedures. Write an email telling me of one reasonable likely application of this procedure within each part of the course major topics... populations, faunal space, and human groups.
- Read about Permutations and about the sequence of ecological events as well as managerial actions that may be more important than counts or amounts. Send me a quick note on the difference between the permutations of 7 and 8
(of anything like parts of a management decision).
- Read
- Read and study Feedback and its major link. Send me your best example of course-relevant feedback that is analogous to the thermostat.
- Read and study Feedforward and
Predicting Futures: A Role of Science. Send a brief note convincing me that you know the differnce between a -monitoring and feedback and b- feedforward and prediction.
Strategic Knowledge Bases: Inputs to Decisions
- Read
- The Professional Library - Suggestions for building and maintaining a library and flow of information. No response needed.
- Alternatives to Conventional Research. Write a note to me suggesting that you see how the results of a research effort, clearly "output," can also be "input."
- Research Note: Developing Hypotheses. Sketch for yourself the likely graphical relations between population abundance (the vertical, y axis) and increasing forage (the horizontal, x axis). Will it be a straight line? Pass through zero?; sketch the likely relations of hunting pressure (y) as a function of increasing residential expansion acres(x). Straight line? Discuss these with someone. No response needed. These are open ended questions but eventually someone must act based on "known" relations for the future.
- Studies and Research - The limited role of science for providing inputs to decisions
- The Reconnaissance - Working the field trip and first overview of an area with wildlife resource management potentials. No response required.
Social Dimensions
- Read People Management - a long, diverse and difficult unit. Develop personal notes, emphasizing whether decision making should be included in this topic... or where? Be sure to evaluate carefully: to assure that learning has occurred, there must be observed a significant behavioral change. Change attitudes, you argue! Where is the evidence? Only in behavioral change after the attitude change.
- Read Life Along a Continuum - The Citizen as Hunter or Not? No response needed.
- Read A Wildlife Law Enforcement System a chapter within Forest Faunal Systems. Find out what "conditional" means relative to mathemetics and to probability and decision making... a little (the only) outside reading or required discussion. Write about and send me a small paper on faunal resource management success as conditional upon an effective widlife law enforcement system.
- Skim The Lasting Forests Law Enforcement Folder to become aware of the resources available.
- Read A Matter of Logic and write to me three personal recent local encounters with faulty logic (examples for the list).
- Read Funding the Modern Wildlife Agency: A letter to a Virginia State Representative for ideas. No response needed.
- Read Teaching Systems to see the bredth of potential application of a systems approach within the field. No response needed.
- Read Debriefings. No response needed.
Wild Faunal Population Concepts
- Study...
- Read The Individual Animal in the Population, an idea of an n-dimensional temporal faunamass ...as with faunal space.
- Read Using Knowledge of the Elements of Animal Behavior
- Read Population Structure a chapter from Forest Faunal Systems... relevance of sex ratio; age ratio; density; genetic unit. Write to me the proportion of females in a population of 123 females and 268 males. Also express the ratio as females per 100 females. Note that age classes may be life groups when they have very different requirements that may be met by creative management. Memorize the 4 major aspects of structure.
- Read The Basics for Estimating Population Size, outlines of philosophy, need, and limitations of population estimation. Memorize at least 5 means or reasons for resisting population estimation.
- Population Estimation - The Home Range Procedure (included within the previous notes)
- Communicate with classmates, as needed, about expected frustrations among you and classmates who are zoologists/ecologists and who are not being involved directly with such topics as:
- Read Population Dynamics , the change phenomena and rates. Memorize the names of the major rates that must be estimated and mastered. Estimate what the population will be in 12 years when the estimator is Nt = N0(1.0 + r )t , the beginning population is 450 animals, and the rate of change is about 0.11. What if the population estimate ranges from 410 to 460 and the rate estimate may be from 0.09 to 0.15? Make the estimates for the outside limits or bounds and put the results in a 2 x 2 table. Let me know what you find out.
- Composite Class Project - The definition contains structure, dynamics, and relations. Let's see what you can do as a team (emphasizing relations) to write (with full authorship) an educational unit on Relations. The pattern has been set. I'll put the results on the web. You make the list, analyze carefully, organize carefully, describe the parts, and show the relationships of the realtions...etc. Cut and paste from email; elect or gain volunteers as two editors or assembly persons; everyone (co-authorship even for later publication if you so desire) must assure me of their agreement with the material that is finally unified without individual authorship. Minority comment will be accepted (if absolutely needed.) Think of the class as a system with a clear objective ... an educational unit with 95% probability of becomming part of this course material for future students. Use html or make it as fancy as you like but this is not desired or required, only a descriptive and educational unit. Giles will put it on the web (unless an expert in the class decides to do so).
Faunal Population Manipulation
- Read Population Manipulation a chapter from Forest Faunal Systems
- Managing the Animals
- Read Bounties and arguements against their use. Make no response. See it within the previous list?
- Read Stocking Game - Advantages and disadvantages. Make no response.
- Species-Area Relations - The greater the area, the more the species. Using Harris' equation and remembering there are 640 acres in a square mile, what is the likely richness of a 12,000 acre tract? Send the instructor a one-sentence answer. Be sure to think about modifying this relationship with edge phenomena later. Consider counties as isomorphic with islands.
Faunal Space and its Manipulation
- Changing Faunal Space (a long chapter in Forest Faunal Systems)
- Read Managing Faunal Space The "habitat" replacement. Consider sample size and the cost of studies.
- Read Forest Illusion.
- Read Access.
- Mail an answer: How would you know what might constitute a theory of faunal cover?
- Read Geomorphic Components of Faunal Space
- Read On Edge: Practical Analyses of Wildland Edges
- Read Alternative Definitions of Carrying Capacity
- Read Thirteen Ways to Manipulate Succession
- Read Landscape Ecology Notes
- Read HEP and HSI -The Habitat Suitability Model as an Approach
- Read Use of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) Tomorrow - A conference speech, 1999, Lake Tahoe. Write to me at least 5 major applications of GIS (realistic potential or actual examples) in faunal system management.
Unification: Natural Resource Enterprises
- Comprehend the scope and utility of The Trevey , a dynamic planning system, as an agency or private land alternative. Email your answers to: How does it relate to feedforward?, It is designed to help achieve natural resource-related objectives of people. What are its likely internal policy-like objectives (answer Type ?) objectives?
- Read The Deer Group - Example of newsletter articles for a total, species-specific, profit-oriented resource system. Link to the enterprise and see how far beyond "leasing land for hunting" the potentials may become.
- Read A Turkey "Guild"
- Read Bobwhite Quail - Two in the Bush and Intensive Bobwhite Quail Resource Management
- Read The Fur System
- Read A Proposed Owl Resource Enterprise then summarize (a paragraph) for each of the following:
- What is The Owl Group?
- What species of owls might be encountered within your area?
- List likely reasons why such an enterprise might fail. Can each of these be overcome?
- List activities and planning aids that you would use if you were hired to work within this group.
- Read Integrated Vertebrate Damage Management and The Pest Force Be sure you grasp the need to control or manage damage, not necessarily animal population abundance or density.
- Read A Raccoon System, the recommendations for a single-species emphasis are provided from The Trevey. Also read Raccoon Management
- Look at (link to) any three unit within Species-Specific Management, a set of about 80 statements about actions to take to improve conditions for species. Note their system pattern. You should link first to birds or mammals, then the species. (You, your students, and associates are encouraged to assist in expanding this resource for future students.) Make no response now.
- Study quickly The Conglomerate:The Craig County project proposal, a proposed county-level or regional rural resource management enterprises. Then see the less county-specific current business plan for an enterprise called Rural System, Inc. Be sure you see the indoor and outdoor units and that of System Central. I've been told that this idea for a for-profit rural-resource-based enterprise is "hard to wrap your mind around it." Show me how you do that by sending me a copy of an email describing it to a colleague within some area of rural resources (cc:).
Final Exam
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Last revision January 14, 2004.