Implementing the 2012 North American Waterfowl Management Plan: people conserving waterfowl and wetlands

Abstract

The North American Waterfowl Management Plan (NAWMP) is a continental ecosystems model for wildlife conservation planning with worldwide implications. Since established in 1986, NAWMP has undergone continual evolution as challenges to waterfowl conservation have emerged and information available to support conservation decisions has become available. In the 2012 revision, the waterfowl management community revisited the fundamental basis for the Plan and placed greater emphasis on sustaining the Plan’s conservation work and on integration across disciplines of harvest and habitat management. Most notably, traditional and nontraditional users (i.e. hunters and wildlife viewers) of the resource and other conservation supporters are integrated into waterfowl conservation planning. Challenges ahead for the waterfowl management enterprise include addressing tradeoffs that emerge when habitat for waterfowl populations versus habitat for humans are explicitly considered, how these objectives and decision problems can be linked at various spatial and temporal scales, and most fundamentally how to sustain NAWMP conservation work in the face of multi-faceted ecological and social change.