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

Our ability to effectively manage natural resources is founded in an understanding of how our actions and the environment influence ecological systems. Current practices use monitoring data from the past to determine key ecological relationships and make predictions about the future. In most cases, these forecasts assume that the environmental conditions observed in the past will remain the same in the future. However, climate change is influencing ecological systems in many dynamic and uncertain ways, leading to a situation in which our observations of the past are poor predictors of the future. If we continue to use the existing framework to manage natural resources without accounting for global change, our actions could have negative effects. This project investigates the theoretical frameworks for including time-varying system dynamics in decision models. We also apply those concepts to case studies involving waterfowl population management in the central U.S.