State Wildlife Grant - T-5-1

The partner agencies and organizations that comprise the NGPJV believe all bird conservation goals and objectives developed for the portion of BCR 17 in North Dakota must be based upon sound biological foundations. These biological foundations have two basic components: prioritizing species based on their ecological vulnerability and conservation need, and determining relationships between the abundance and viability of birds and habitat conditions at a variety of biologically relevant spatial scales. Once these relationships are established, they can be used to guide conservation design, delivery, and to assess the kinds and amount of habitat needed to reach regional and continental bird population goals. These are also goals identified in North Dakota’s Comprehensive Wildlife Conservation Strategy (CWCS) which must be fulfilled. Both prioritization and species-habitat relationships require periodic reassessment because vulnerabilities can change over time and our knowledge of how bird populations fluctuate in response to changes in habitat conditions is still relatively limited for many Northern Great Plains species. This is consistent with the tenants of Adaptive Management (AM) and AM will be key to conservation success. To that end an iterative process of conservation delivery followed by assessment (evaluation of bird response) of conservation efforts will be pursued by the NGPJV to assist in satisfying the objectives identified in North Dakota’s CWCS.