RELOADED EP219 - Waterfowl Harvest Management Series, Part 9: An Intro to Adaptive Harvest Management

Concern for waterfowl populations and frustration with the status quo of duck harvest management in the late 80s stimulated new ideas for setting annual regulations and learning about their effects. Dr. Jim Nichols, retired senior scientist from Patuxent Wildlife Research Center and one of the godfathers of Adaptive Harvest Management, joins the DU Podcast to introduce waterfowl harvest dynamics, adaptive management, and the regulatory atmosphere that ultimately produced AHM.

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Host

Mike Brasher

DUPodcast Science Host

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Ducks Unlimited Podcast is a constant discussion of all things waterfowl; from in-depth hunting tips and tactics, to waterfowl biology, research, science, and habitat updates. The DU Podcast is the go-to resource for waterfowl hunters and conservationists. Ducks Unlimited is the world's leader in wetlands conservation.

VO: 00:34

Welcome to the Ducks Unlimited Podcast RELOADED, where we bring you the best of our past episodes. Whether you're a seasoned waterfowler or curious about conservation, this series is for you. Over the years, we've had incredible guests and discussions about everything from wetland conservation to the latest waterfowl research and hunting strategies. In RELOADED, we're revisiting those conversations to keep the passion alive and the mission strong. So sit back, relax, and enjoy this reload.

Mike Brasher: 01:05

Today, we're gonna be welcoming a new guest to our series on the history of waterfowl harvest management. Today, we're gonna be digging into some details on adaptive harvest management. We introduced this topic with Dale and Ken, but today, I am I am pleased to be welcoming a as our guest, a guy that spent the better part of his career in harvest management for waterfowl and various analytical aspects of that, certainly was an influential figure in the development and implementation of adaptive harvest management. Very quantitatively minded, and I am excited to welcome to this episode Doctor. Jim Nichols, retired from the US Fish and Wildlife Service US Geological Survey, I think, most recently.

Mike Brasher: 01:45

So, Jim, thank you so much for joining us here and and being willing to discuss adaptive harvest management in a bit more detail. So welcome, Jim.

Jim Nichols: 01:51

Oh, thanks very much, Mike. It's a real pleasure to be here. Thank you.

Mike Brasher: 01:55

Well, it is my treat I feel like it's more my treat to to have you on as a guest. I have, for as long as I've been in this career, sort of seen your name associated with a lot of the work that has been done regarding waterfowl harvest management. And to get to speak with you about some of this is a is a true treat. So thank you for sharing your time with us here. To get started, Jim, how about you provide a bit of background, personal and professional background to our listeners on, I guess, what you spent the majority of your career doing?

Mike Brasher: 02:25

You can actually start before that and talk about where you went to school and even where you grew up and things of that nature, but yeah, just give people an idea of who you are.

Jim Nichols: 02:34

I grew up in the mountains in Western Virginia, not West Virginia, but Western Virginia, but because it was the mountains there, I grew up without any sort of waterfowling tradition at all, you know, there's plenty of hunting there, but but not of ducks and geese, and really I didn't begin waterfowl hunting until I actually moved to Maryland around Chesapeake Bay for for my first job. I went to school at Wake Forest University for an undergraduate degree and then LSU and Michigan State University for graduate work. And once again, you're gonna think I'm a poor guy for your show here because in neither of those cases did my research have anything to do with waterfowl. What they did have to do with was population dynamics of harvested species. And so when I got out of school I looked around for positions and was thinking of either a university or a government agency.

Jim Nichols: 03:36

And I saw this one from the, it had an odd name that you're probably much too young to remember or know about, it's called Migratory Bird and Habitat Research Lab, which was sort of an outgrowth of the old migratory bird population station that lived at Patuxent Wildlife Research Center, so that's where it was housed. Anyway, they had an opening for somebody to focus on population dynamics of waterfowl and specifically it had a lot to do with estimation and modeling and just because I'd had, you know, my graduate work involved some of that stuff, I guess they were silly enough to offer me a job and hire me. So I went out there and basically did a crash course in sort of duckology, trying to learn as much as I could in a real quick time. For example, my first summer there I was, I was really lucky, I was able to accompany Art Brasher, an old Fish and Wildlife Service pilot, up into the prairies during the times when folks were banding ducks and this was this would be late summer and basically fly around with him from one banding station to another in Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta and we'd stop and drink beer and ban ducks for a few days and then move on to another place, but it was a really neat experience.

Jim Nichols: 04:59

Anyway, lots of things like that to sort of try to immerse me in waterfowl world. I became a regular attendee at the flyway regulations meetings, I went more frequently to the Mississippi and Central than the others, but in any case I became immersed in sort of waterfowl management and especially harvest management. Now in those days, is maybe a little more than you wanted but it's kind of, anyway, of relevant and important to me. In those days, fish and wildlife service folks were put into two different categories, were research folks and management folks and luckily the research lab that I landed in was one where the center director had a real strong tie to management and he basically had the idea that research folks shouldn't even exist if they weren't real darn useful to management and that, and I still kind of hold that belief myself that, you know, it's not this idea of research folks sort of do random walks into places that are interesting to them, but they remain focused on what their information is supposed to be useful for. And for me it was very easy to keep that focus because there was a real important part of the Office of Migratory Bird Management that was housed there at Patuxent.

Jim Nichols: 06:21

And those were the folks that coordinated aerial surveys, know, the duck counts each May and the folks that did stuff like estimate survival rates and harvest rates from band recovery data. And so there was a real quantitative group of folks who just happened to be in the management bucket. I was in the research bucket, but we both worked together as a group really really well. And for the first almost two decades in my career there, that's what I did. And I will mention that in the early 1990s, all the research folks from Fish and Wildlife Service were kind of yanked out of Fish and Wildlife Service and placed in first something called the National Biological Survey and later in the US Geological Survey, none of it made any sense to me.

Jim Nichols: 07:10

But so for the remainder of my career I was not with the Fish and Wildlife Service. And in fact there were no administrative pressures sort of to work with Fish and Wildlife Service folks, but luckily because of the fact that I cultivated these various personal relationships and interests with the office of migratory bird management, I was able to keep on working with those folks for the rest of my career. And it wasn't as good as it was because I was shunted off on some other things, I've worked on tiger in India and manatees and spider, anyway a whole bunch of different things, but at least I was able to hopefully retain some working relationship with the Felizen office in Martyratory Bird Management. And I officially retired in 2015, but I'm still, Scott Boomer and I, well, Ray Johnson's, a number of other folks, are still working on folks, excuse me, on topics that have to do with waterfowl and waterfowl management. So I apologize if that was a bit long winded, but I, anyway, wanted to let folks know my interest in management.

Mike Brasher: 08:23

No. I appreciate you doing so, Jim. That that type of more extended background, I I find very interesting, and, you know, certainly once you've retired, you it means you've spent your you've had a long career behind you, and so there comes with that a number of a number of stops along the way or maybe not necessarily stops in terms of a physical location, but in terms of the type of things that you worked on. So, no, every bit of that background is relevant, and I appreciate appreciate you sharing that. And with regard to you still being engaged in some of these harvest management topics, there there is a there's a tendency for that to happen.

Mike Brasher: 08:59

The people that have demonstrated throughout their career tremendous competencies in certain areas, they tend to find a way to well, those of us that are that are left behind, still employed, we're still actively working, find a way somehow to bring those people that that had retired back into our back into our efforts in some way. And so that's that's a compliment to you, obviously, but everyone that knows you will certainly appreciate that and understand that. So good to have you still in some of those conversations. I also wanted to ask you, like, when you when you came out of grad school, how much did you know about the as a as a population ecologist, you know, that effort depends on data. In order to make progress in learning about populations, you have to have data.

Mike Brasher: 09:49

Right? So when you came out of grad school, how much did you know about the level of data acquisition that was that was in place for waterfowl? And then once you really became immersed in it, were you, as a population ecologist, sort of like a kid in a candy store, having access to all these different streams of data at such large scales?

Jim Nichols: 10:13

Yeah, so the first part, did I know much about it before I applied for the position and, excuse me, coming out of graduate school, the answer is no. I had no clue that there was a group who sort of monitored populations as extensively as the US Fish and Wildlife Service does, and well in states and CWS as well, private outfits such as DU. I had no idea such an effort was going on for a population at that level. In fact, I've made statements many times that of all the sort of population monitoring efforts that I know of over the world for vertebrates, I don't know of any that is as impressive to me as the one that is basically for continental waterfowl in North America. Now in terms of what I did is once I found out about this position, I did do a little bit of homework and I had, I sort of gained a bit of an idea that yeah, it did look like a lot of stuff would be, a lot of interesting data were available and that's one of the things that excited me about the position.

Jim Nichols: 11:24

What I didn't realize was that I sort of figured out, I sort of had this notion that boy, if you estimated all these things that folks were able to estimate for ducks, population size, age ratio, something about reproductive rate, and survival rates as well, I thought man, you've got you've got it all, there is no question you can't address once you've got all that stuff. And only when I got to my position and started asking questions about the influence of harvest, for example, on population dynamics, that I realized that it was, it was more than just lots of data, you had to think hard about, anyway, situations in contrast that allowed you to collect just the right data. But yeah, I was very very excited about the sort of the monitoring programs that had been established by folks who had just an incredible amount of foresight. I can't imagine, anyway, the foresight of some of the fellows, Walt Crissy and folks who established some of these programs a long long time ago.

Mike Brasher: 12:31

I know everyone in this profession is thankful that whatever happened when you were looking for jobs coming out of school that directed you to the one that you ended up applying for and being offered and accepting, whatever the circumstances were around that, we're all thankful that it led you to your career in this field because you have made tremendous contributions to what it is that we're going to talk about here and beyond, so that leads me in a transition to our to our our topic, and that is one of adaptive harvest management. We have introduced this already in our conversations with Ken, Ken Babcock and Dale Humberg, but we wanted to get someone on here to talk in a bit more detail. And when I say in a bit more detail, that can mean any number of things when we start talking about kind of adaptive harvest management. You you and you would be qualified to discuss any and and all of that to whatever depth we wanted to. At some level, some more detailed level, we wanted to dig into this topic, and we thought it would be useful to kinda go back to the years when adaptive harvest management was first being conceived, first being introduced.

Mike Brasher: 13:44

Dale and Ken have shared some of what that environment was like in the harvest regulation setting process that led to the implementation of adaptive harvest management in 1995, and it's been in place ever since. And hunters of today know, probably know the term adaptive harvest management, but how much they they understand about about how it works and some of the different pieces is that's probably highly variable across our our population of hunters, and so this is an opportunity to do a bit of a historical reflection on what things were like at the beginning of why it came about, and then also talk in some detail about the components of it. We're not going to be able to get into every aspect of adaptive harvest management and all the different population models, but you're you were highly recommended as a person that we should talk to about this because of your involvement from the beginning. So let's let's start there, back to the early well, I guess, me ask you this. Remind me, Jim, when you first came to the Fish and Wildlife Service.

Mike Brasher: 14:53

What year was that?

Jim Nichols: 14:54

That was 1976, so long time ago.

Mike Brasher: 14:58

Okay, so 1976, that means that you would have been around for the stabilized regulations program. If I remember correctly, that came about in 1979. That was a precursor to to adaptive harvest management. There's we've talked about that also with Ken and and Dale. So I assume that you worked on the in some way with the stabilized regulations program and everything that came out of that.

Mike Brasher: 15:26

Talk a little about what that time was like, what we were learning or what we were still uncertain about with regard to harvest management and how our harvest regulatory decisions influence waterfowl population dynamics, ultimately leading us to begin discussing an alternative model which eventually became The

Jim Nichols: 15:45

key uncertainty, I guess, about how to set regulations, about smart ways to set regulations had to do with the influence of harvest rates on populations. And a lot of it was focused at that time on survival rates. And there were basically two kind of simple minded but extreme hypotheses about how that happened and there was, whichever one of those hypotheses was right, they led to very different kinds of regulations and so it was natural that there was a lot of dissension and argument about those. So the basic hypotheses are the one, it's often called the additive mortality hypothesis, but it basically says if you shoot one bird during the hunting season then that's one fewer bird that's got a chance to make babies and contribute to the population for the next fall flight, the next hunting season. And then you had an alternative sort of hypothesis that says, wait a minute, there's something going on such that if you end up taking birds during the hunting season, somehow it's things are a little bit better for the guys that are left, the guys that survived the hunting season, and you actually don't have much of a reduction in the ability of the spring population to produce a nice fall flight for the next year.

Jim Nichols: 17:16

A couple of mechanisms that could produce this so called compensatory mortality hypothesis, one I can talk about those, but maybe for right now I'd just say there are a couple of stories that could lead to that. Well, okay, I'll just say one of them has to do with this notion of density dependent mortality which basically says, okay, during the wintertime there's a certain amount of food today for ducks to eat and if we go ahead and reduce the number of ducks that are around at the end of winter when times are tough and reduce it via hunting, then the guys that are left they have much less competition for the food that's around and are better able to survive, actually exhibit higher survival rates to get to the spring for a chance to breed, than if they had been had, if they had had to compete with all these other individuals that ended up not being around because they had been shot. So that was one of two sort of main mechanisms that could have produced this thing called compensatory mortality. And so that was sort of the key uncertainty in how you develop models that project consequences of your management decisions, is how many birds do we shoot, what kinds of harvest rates do we try to retain each year.

Jim Nichols: 18:38

And of course you can imagine that people with very, anyway that different people would have very, you know, would tend to gravitate to one or more, to one of those two hypotheses depending on sort of their views about how duck populations were doing or what was important to them. In other words, it turned out for example some state agencies and state biologists, they tended to view their jobs at that time as basically trying to do the bet which is a natural thing, trying to do the best they could for their hunting public And so they wanted the kind of most liberal regulations in terms of season lengths and bag limits that they could possibly attain. And that's a reasonable thing for them to have wanted. And so naturally they would tend to, you know, the hypothesis that favored that sort of regulatory preference was this compensatory mortality hypothesis. On the other hand, if you had somebody, for example, like we were sued for example by, we, the Fish and Wildlife Service was sued by Defenders of Wildlife for black duck hunting regulations shortly after I joined the Fish and Wildlife Service since there obviously there were some groups who very much favored the additive mortality hypothesis.

Jim Nichols: 19:53

And the interesting thing was this idea of which hypothesis you favored often didn't have anything to do with data or what you happen to know about populations, but it happened, it had more to do with what your sort of other objectives were. So anyway, that ended up being a real key source of uncertainty.

Mike Brasher: 20:15

Well, couple of things that I'll say here. It's probably worth sharing just for our listeners that these, the discussions around the effect of harvest on waterfowl populations is not dissimilar from the way conversations and analyses occur relative to the effect of harvest on other game bird populations. I I remember growing up, or I remember when I was in school at Mississippi State, there's the concept of, and this is related to compensatory mortality, what we want to harvest, well, we refer to that portion of the population that we harvest as the harvestable surplus, surplus signifying that there's some portion of the population that's gonna die even in the absence of hunting mortality, and so that's the component of the population that we want to harvest and not go too far beyond that. And so, do I have that right, Jim? Am I remembering correctly that that idea of a harvestable surplus is a reflection of a compensatory mortality kinda hypothesis?

Jim Nichols: 21:14

Yeah. So to me, they're similar and in fact, I I just mentioned one sort of mechanism underlying compensatory mortality, the other one is very similar to ideas that Paul Arrington and people had had about harvestable surplus, which was the idea that a population, you can think of it, is comprised of two different flavors of individuals and of course it's not just two, it's a distribution of these, but basically you have sort of wimpy guys, you have individuals who aren't so adapted in terms of their ability to survive or make babies or whatever, and then you had individuals that were sort of a lot better off, those they had a sort of greater ability just by individual variation for withstanding not only being you know smart enough not to get shot by a hunter, but also being able to escape predators and such things. And so that's sort of the this notion, that's one flavor of the harvestable surplus idea, is this heterogeneity of individuals and the idea that hunting mortality or harvest takes sort of the weaker ones to begin with, and so the ones you have left were gonna be the big contributors to the population anyway, and they're still around, or a bigger fraction of them is.

Mike Brasher: 22:31

And I think an earlier episode that we had with Doctor. Drew Fowler is one of the examples for which there is evidence of this heterogeneity in the population. And as you described it, there are some of the some wimpier birds that are in the population that are more vulnerable to harvest, and that's what Drew showed with some of his research relative to the harvest of snow geese during spring is that those that were harvested over decoys, if I remember this correctly, tended to be have lower body condition or from those harvested randomly, something of that nature. So anyway, there is evidence in support of that mechanism.

VO: 23:13

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Mike Brasher: 23:59

Let's move into a discussion of, a more direct discussion of What we've just kind of talked about here is the fact that there's disagreement, at least back at that time, was a fairly high level of disagreement among some of the stakeholders and some of the decision makers relative to harvest management about what the actual effect of harvest was on the population. That seems to be, if I'm getting this correctly, that seems to be sort of at the heart of the matter, trying to make decisions on what the harvest should be such that we're able to sustain the population, provide harvest opportunities without doing harm to the population. And in order to make those responsible decisions, you have to kind of understand the effects of your harvest regulations on the populations. And so there's still a lot of debate about that is what you're basically saying. And I guess there still is in some respects, but what was it about adaptive what was it about that era, whether it be those discussions, what was it about maybe the state of our our understanding of population dynamics as it was occurring at that time, but what was it that led us to look to adaptive harvest management as a potential advancement in the way we try to resolve some of our differences, some of our uncertainties about waterfowl harvest management?

Jim Nichols: 25:22

Okay. Well, in terms of the politics, I'll just sum up sort of what you what you already have stated and what we talked about a minute ago. So right around in the sort of late 80s and 90s it was a time when basically hunters and many of the folks in states were very interested again in sort of fairly frequent changes in harvest regulations as a way to maximize duck harvest, the waterfowl harvest, and it was a very natural thing for them to want to do. What was interesting, it was also a time when we were recognizing how little we actually knew about the effects of those regulations. And for example, we'd have zones and splits and experimental teal seasons and they were called experimental, but when you looked at the way that we actually evaluated them in the data that we had, as neat and great as those great big continental data sets are, when you start asking questions about effects of, as I say, of a split season or zone within a particular state, all of a sudden those big numbers get really really small in a hurry.

Jim Nichols: 26:29

And so that led to a couple of things that I view as sort of watershed, sort of key conclusion, so there was a supplemental environmental impact statement that was published by the Fish and Wildlife Service in 1988 and John Taunton was the guy who was assigned, he was actually headed it up. But one of their conclusions was that the amount of, basically our knowledge, our ability to fine tune things was such that we probably shouldn't be sort of jacking around with or messing around with regulations quite as frequently as we had been, but instead we should evoke sort of a, or invoke, excuse me, sort of a risk aversive conservatism where we realized that because we didn't know as much as we should, we ought to kind of operate conservatively so as not to harm duck populations. And again in a, you know, in a simple minded way that was consistent with the 1918 Migratory Bird Treaty Act basically says, okay, hunting is fine and nothing wrong with it at all, but as long as it's compatible with maintenance and persistence of waterfowl populations. So that was the, it was key that that was the sort of primary objective, and then if hunting could be fitted in with that, that was great, but if not, we had to pay first pay attention to birds.

Jim Nichols: 27:55

So anyway, this environmental impact statement in 1988 came to that conclusion. Now then there was a special session at the North American Wildlife Conference in 1989 that actually dealt with migratory birds and dealt with that environmental impact statement. In two papers in it, I'll focus on one, one of them was by a guy named Fred Johnson, who I'll talk a lot more about in me, that dealt with our sort of inability, sort of efforts to try to come out effect or try to develop inferences about effects of different regulation changes and we ran into a lot of difficulties and basically talked about how difficult it was to do that sometimes, but then at a much more general and broad level, Kim Babcock and Raleigh Sparrow, Raleigh at that time was the chief of the office of migratory bird management, they had sort of a summary paper for that session And in that summary paper they once again came to the conclusion that there was just, there had been a lot of fine tuning that folks were interested in in regulations that had been going on, but it was really really hard to justify. And what they were suggesting is that one possible response of a large federal agency like Fish and Wildlife Service that was charged with duck hunting regulations, a not unreasonable response would be to to try to do away with as many of those fine tuning efforts as we could because we couldn't predict their effects.

Jim Nichols: 29:28

And there were even a suggestion in that paper, for example, maybe setting regulations at three year intervals. In other words, instead of setting a regulation every single year, well, we don't know enough to do that, so let's just do it every third year. And so both the Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement in 'eighty eight and that special session of the North American in 1989 basically led to this idea that we were, the kinds of things we were trying to do with regulations were way ahead of the actual knowledge that we had, and so that maybe we better slow down. And once again, this again was not, it was not the kind of conclusion that was taken well by hunters as you could imagine, because they were, a lot of the state biologists, they were much more focused on trying to implement those regulations that even if they didn't have firm evidence for, they were pretty darn sure based on their experience could actually bring their hunters more ducks. Neither group was being unreasonable, but there was absolutely a very big difference of opinion.

Mike Brasher: 30:32

Jim, the fine tuning that you referred to, I I think, is in the same basket as the way Dale spoke about harvest managers in the throughout well, ever since the federal government obtained jurisdiction over the harvest of migratory birds, Dale noted, and we've been kind of stepping through in our past episodes, examples of what the regulations were in terms of day length and bag limit and shooting hours and and all these little tweaks. Dale referred to that as harvest managers never being never lacking creativity in how we in how we come up with harvest regulations. And that's what you're talking about, I think, is the all these different fine aspects of fine tuning the harvest regulations, but then what what others are saying is, yeah, we can do those, and maybe we can, in our mind, say, come up with why it makes sense, but analytically, we don't have the data to effectively measure the impacts of that. Is that is that a fair assessment?

Jim Nichols: 31:32

That's exactly right. No no way on earth would I ever say that those things were stupid or that people didn't, you know, that they weren't necessarily good ideas, but it's just that we hadn't, there was no way we could obtain the evidence at that sort of fine scale that actually supported them, and that was the bothersome part about it.

Mike Brasher: 31:50

Jim, another very important aspect of, well, any decision making process is going to be having an objective, knowing what it is that you're trying to achieve through through those decisions, through those actions. And I I talked earlier just in a very general sense about our objective for harvest management is to provide harvest opportunity without harming the population, but that's just a very nebulous description of of an objective. And so I I know that one of the most important, and I'll ask you if you if it's the most important aspects of adaptive harvest management or any kind of harvest management decision relates to the objective behind our decisions. But at that time, before adaptive harvest management, is was there also some lack of clarity, lack of consensus on what our objective was? How explicit was the objective for harvest management back in those times, and was that another one of the reasons why we kind of moved towards Adaptive Harvest Management?

Jim Nichols: 32:53

Yeah, so this is more personal opinion, I can't, you know, I'm not positive what was true in everybody's head, but that's exactly I think what one of the issues was. If you were a federal guy, if you were worked for the feds, as I said, you went back to the Migratory Bird Treaty Act and the maintenance and persistence of bird populations, that attained, that had primacy, that was your number one goal. And trying to permit hunting that was consistent with that was absolutely an objective as well, but it was clear which one was the primary objective and that was maintenance of bird populations. And what my guess is or what my thought is, is that a lot of times if you're a state waterfowl biologist or if you're a private outfit, if you're someone like Dean, you recognize that one of a very important objective is maintenance of your duck hunter population. You know, certainly over recent years we've seen things about that that are alarming to those of us who enjoy and like duck hunting.

Jim Nichols: 34:00

And so when you went into a regulations meeting for example, you went into one of the flyway meetings, they were never explicitly stated, but when you would have discussions or disagreements about whether, for example, the set of regulations that the feds would propose for a particular year and when there was backlash or response to that, very often it seemed to me to reflect the idea that there was this greater importance attached to the maintenance of the hunter population then the feds were sort of allowed to attach because of the migratory bird treaty act and so it did seem to me that different objectives actually came into play as part of the reasons underlying people's different ideas about what regulations ought to be.

Mike Brasher: 34:52

Okay. So to summarize here, based on my my understanding, my reading, at that time, prior to the implementation of we had we had a highly complex regulatory environment, that's some of the fine tuning that you're talking about. We had a lack of of common understanding about population dynamics. That was the the additive versus compensatory mortality hypotheses, and there's some other aspects of that as well. But the bottom line is we didn't have a common, confident understanding of waterfowl population dynamics and how harvest affected those.

Mike Brasher: 35:27

And then there was, as we just talked about here, lack of lack of clarity or lack of agreement on a clear lack of agreement on an objective behind some of our decisions. So, then along comes adaptive harvest management as the solution to all of it. Right? I say that kinda tongue in cheek, but but that was that was sort of a characterization of the environment as I understand it, and adaptive harvest management was viewed as a potential path forward to begin to address some of those things in a maybe more coordinated, more consensus driven, I don't even know if that's the right way of describing it, but just to try to make some progress on some of those issues and really move us forward in our understanding of waterfowl harvest management and decisions around that. So, Jim, I guess here is where we really transition to adaptive harvest management.

Mike Brasher: 36:23

Why don't we start I mean, you can you can clean up anything that I might've just said there, but after you do that, why don't you start by giving a layperson description of what adaptive harvest management is? We'll have plenty of opportunity here as we go forward to get into all the different components and the details of it, but how would you describe it to to the average person?

Jim Nichols: 36:45

Yeah, so there are a bunch of sort of couple of sentence description is is basically is what you're trying to do is make a smart management decision, where smart means you're trying to do something that are consistent with your objective, get you towards your objectives as best you can, but you're trying to do it in the face of uncertainty. And not only are you trying to make the smartest decision now in the face of the uncertainty that exists right at this moment when you have to make the decision, but in addition to that you're trying to learn from the decision you make so that you can be even smarter in the future. In other words, you're trying to make a decision now in the face of uncertainty and then try to simultaneously reduce that uncertainty so that decisions you make as you go further and further into the future are hopefully smarter in the sense that they're doing a better job of getting you towards your objectives. So if you had to ask me a two or three or whatever sentence summary, that's kind of what you're trying to do.

Mike Brasher: 37:50

The interesting thing here, Jim, is I'll have to go back and listen to it, but I don't think you mentioned waterfowl harvest at all in that definition, which was great that you didn't because it reminds me that I need to say that that adaptive management, adaptive resource management, is not just restricted to waterfowl harvest. That's obviously the nature of our conversation here, and that's what a h m, adaptive harvest management, relates to, but adaptive resource management or adaptive management in general can be applied to any type of recurring decision. We talk about it also a lot on the habitat side of things where when we talk about uncertainty, that means that we that basically just means we don't fully understand how the system works and how it's going to respond to the management action that we put in place, whether it be a restoration activity, an enhancement activity, if we're talking about habitat, or any other kind of decision that we can envision or imagine that we're undertaking as a hopeful way of achieving some objective. So there's incomplete understanding of how that system is gonna respond to our action, and so I'm thankful you used that general definition because it did prompt me to remind folks that, you know, adaptive management is something that we preach, that we talk about in basically every aspect of waterfowl management that we do.

Mike Brasher: 39:16

Now, adaptive harvest management is a bit unique because of the the formalization of that process. It has taken adaptive resource management to a very pure a more pure application of adaptive resource management than we really see in any other aspect of waterfowl management, and those are we're kind of getting into some of the some very fine details there, but the fact that we have such long standing and and valuable data streams on the harvest and population side of things allows us to allows us to go into this more formalized aspect of adaptive resource management around the harvest side of things. Does that make am I getting that right? I kinda need you to serve as my backup here to make sure that I don't say anything that's wrong, Jim.

Jim Nichols: 40:06

Yeah, now the only thing that I would say a little bit, and there's a reason for this, it's just so people can, yeah, who have no matter what kind of decision can think about the potential to use this. You're exactly right, this thing is more with the duck harvest regulations, that's the first really good formal use, use of formal adaptive management that I think exists and I still cite it as the very best example of that in the world. The only thing I take issue with a slight bit is the idea of the data needs for implementing adaptive management. And in fact this is something that we get very frequently if we're preaching use of adaptive management say for a different kind of problem, because we started out with the malware for which exactly as you said, had this incredible data stream and had this all kinds of background information, because of that a very frequent comeback from a manager for some local sort of issue, for example, a habitat issue or whatever, might say, well yeah, that's easy for you guys because you had all these data for mallards, but hey, I've just got this small system and it's not that way, it's not anything like that.

Jim Nichols: 41:23

But my claim is that adaptive, my claim would be that adaptive management is kind of the smartest way to make a management decision in the face of uncertainty almost no matter how much or little data you had. Other words, by just landing here from another planet, I think I'd still use that basic approach. Now it's going to be, it's going to hopefully operate a bit speedier and it's going be a bit easier to implement in cases where you have lots of data, you're absolutely right about that, but I think the general process is such that it's hard for me to imagine doing anything else using any other approach if I have almost any problem that's for for which there's a lot of uncertainty.

Mike Brasher: 42:10

That's that's fair, and I've I've heard that before, and there definitely is some differences in the degree to which it well, I guess the speed at which we can learn about. That's the other thing that that I guess is a key part of this, right, is that the outcome of adaptive management is that well, we make a decision based on our best understanding, but then we also kind of we monitor the outcome of that decision and then update our understanding, right, to improve our decisions going forward. So, Jim, that's probably a good place for us to wrap up this first episode. We have introduced sort of the atmosphere around waterfowl harvest regulations in the late eighties and entering into the early nineties, sort of predating immediately predating adaptive harvest management coming on the scene. We've we've kinda talked about some of the details of of that, and we've of that time, we've also we've also introduced what adaptive management is.

Mike Brasher: 43:09

And now the next step here in this conversation is going to be to talk in a bit more detail about how it was applied to duck harvest management. And so that's going to be the focus of our next episode. So with that, Jim, we're going to wrap up. I'm going to thank you for joining us here on this episode and look forward to you joining us to continue the conversation. So thank you, Jim.

Jim Nichols: 43:33

Okay. Well, thank you so much, Mike.

Mike Brasher: 43:35

A special thanks to our guest on today's episode, doctor Jim Nichols. We appreciate his time in introducing adaptive harvest management for for duck regulations, and we look forward to additional conversations with him. As always, we thank our producer, Clay Baird, for the work that he does on these podcasts, getting them edited and out to you. And, of course, to you, our listeners, we thank you for your time, and we thank you for your support, passion, and commitment to wetlands and waterfowl conservation.

VO: 43:59

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VO: 44:21

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