Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Units Program: South Dakota
Education, Research and Technical Assistance for Managing Our Natural Resources

The project used expert opinion regarding core values, objectives, and priorities from NPS biologists and natural resource chief using email surveys designed to foster consensus via a Delphi Process. Through this process, we will obtain ranked objectives for bald eagle monitoring, and several scenarios by which to achieve them. The scenarios were evaluated and ranked upon their ability to 1) achieve the monitoring objectives, and 2) cost of implementation. We then used an optimizing routine that incorporates scenario rankings and cost to arrive at a solution for monitoring that achieves our most important objectives at the lowest cost.