Developing an alternative approach to wildlife management in the Duke Forest

Abstract

Wildlife management is not currently a major priority of the Duke Forest, but staff have expressed an interest in making it a more significant aspect in future forest management decisions. We here used a multi-criteria decision analysis framework to explore a variety of wildlife management and monitoring alternatives with the aim of providing Duke Forest staff an adaptive tool for making well-informed wildlife management decisions. We identified potential management strategies by looking at forest management plans in use by peer institutions and then conducting a meta-analysis to determine the effect each of the potential strategies had on taxa of interest to Forest staff. We also looked at the possibility of using a community-based monitoring approach to supplement limited Forest staff resources through the use of expert interviews and a formal review of the literature, and assessed the importance of multiple components in ensuring quality data monitoring. We used the results of both of these analyses to construct a decision framework Duke Forest can use to identify wildlife management and monitoring schemes.