Colorado Project
Building USGS Capacity in Modeling: a Collaboration among the Colorado Cooperative Research Unit, the Alaska Science Center, and the Patuxent Wildlife Research Center
August 2010 - August 2015
Personnel
Participating Agencies
- Alaska Science Center
The overarching objective is to develop, in collaboration with stakeholders and USGS research scientists, an adaptive management framework for wildlife populations on the National Petroleum Reserve – Alaska (NPRA). Specific objectives related to this are: (1) to facilitate the development by various stakeholders of specific management objectives that balance the dual Department of Interior (DOI) mandates of facilitating responsible extraction of oil and gas reserves and sustaining wildlife populations, such as molting geese; (2) to work with these same stakeholders to identify practical and politically feasible management actions that could meet the specified objectives; (3) to work with research and management biologists to develop empirically or theoretically tenable models that predict the system response and consequences with respect to the objectives of each candidate management action identified in objective 3; (4) to review current monitoring programs for this system, to determine if they could be improved to inform the decision process more directly; and (5) depending on the agreed upon management objectives and constraints, to explore mathematical approaches to identification of an optimal or satisfactory management policy for this system. Finally, the outcome of developing an adaptive management framework for this particular system should provide at least a structure and perhaps a template for considering adaptive management of other arctic systems.