Topic: Bison Management Plan at Yellowstone National Park

Paper details:

Your assignment is locate,review, and analyze a wildlife management plan. It can be from a State, National, or local park or wildlife refuge or military base. Or it can be a broader, regional plan for a specific species. You need to have access to the entire plan. You should have the plan you want to use approved by me prior to beginning work on this.

The review must cover the following areas:

1) Overview of the agency preparing the plan
2) The population goals
3) Key management actions proposed
4) A critical evaluation of management actions in terms of the implications for the target population

Your review should apply the principles of population ecology learned thus far in this course (particularly in the evaluation section). You will be graded based on your ability to “show what you know” and your ability to analyze the proposed management actions. In other words, I want to see your assessment of how will the proposed management actions influence the population dynamics of the targeted species. I expect you to specifically speak to how the management actions affect the population dynamics and the plan’s stated goals. Use terms and concepts from this course. In other words, I expect to see an explicit discussion of how the actions will affect the BIDE factors, as well as, any other pertinent concept (Allee, Predator-prey cycles, functional vs numerical responses, etc.). Feel free to criticize the management plan in light of what you have learned and be sure to highlight any major holes in the plan.