ABSTRACT

Abstract ......................................................................................................................4 Introduction ................................................................................................................4 The Disconnect ..........................................................................................................5 The Role and Limitations of Managers .....................................................................7 The Role and Limitations of Researchers ..................................................................8 The Change from Game Management to Conservation Biology ...............................8 Similarities between the Medical Field and Wildlife Management ...........................9 Conclusions .............................................................................................................. 10 References ................................................................................................................ 10

Many wildlife professionals perceive that the disconnect between wildlife management and research has happened during the last few decades. I review the wildlife literature and construct a timeline of wildlife management and research to determine if and when the disconnect initially occurred. There appears never to have been a strong relationship between wildlife management and research, even though our profession has strived to link the two prior to the publication of Game Management, by Aldo Leopold in 1933. This weak connection, at best, has lurked in the shadows as the wildlife profession has evolved from a game management-oriented profession into the broad šeld of wildlife conservation we see today. Wildlife managers manipulate systems to achieve a management objective rather than to šnd out how the system works. Wildlife researchers generate knowledge by testing hypotheses. This knowledge is then used to guide and support wildlife management. Romesburg (1981) states that some of the principles of wildlife management were based on unreliable knowledge and that most proposed hypotheses are not tested, but become dogma through verbal repetition. Since the mid-1980s, there have been several papers on how to improve the rigor in wildlife science. Recommendations include improving the quantitative rigor in both undergraduate and graduate wildlife programs, more emphasis on study designs, the formulation of hypotheses, and the testing of those hypotheses. As landscapes become more fragmented, habitat patches become smaller and smaller, and more species are threatened with extinction, wildlife managers and researchers will have to work together on some very complex, dynamic problems. There may not be another chance to get it right.