Spring harvest rates of male wild turkeys (Meleagris gallapavo) influence the number and proportion of adult males in the population and turkey population models have treated harvest as additive to other sources of mortality. Therefore, hunting regulations and their effect on spring harvest rates have direct implications for hunter satisfaction. We used tag recovery models to estimate survival rates, investigate spatial, temporal, and demographic variability in harvest rates, and assess how harvest rates may be related to management strategies and landscape characteristics. We banded 3,266 male wild turkeys throughout New York, Ohio, and Pennsylvania during 2006–2009. We found little evidence that harvest rates varied by year or management zone. The proportion of the landscape that was forested within 6.5 km of the capture location was negatively related to harvest rates; however, even though the proportion forested ranged from 0.008 to 0.96 across our study area, this corresponded to differences in harvest rates of only 2–5%. Annual survival was approximately twice as high for juveniles $({\hat {S}} = 0.64- 0.87)$ as adults $({\hat {S}} = 0.30- 0.41)$. In turn, spring harvest rates for adult turkeys were greater for adults $({\hat {H}} = 0.35- 0.39)$ than juveniles $({\hat {H}} = 0.17- 0.27)$. We estimated the population of male turkeys in New York and Pennsylvania ranged from 104,000 to 132,000 in all years and ranged from 63,000 to 75,000 in Ohio. Because of greater harvest rates for adult males, the proportion of adult males in the population was less than in the harvest and ranged from 0.40 to 0.81 among all states and years. The high harvest rates observed for adults may be offset by greater recruitment of juveniles into the adult age class the following year such that these states can sustain high harvest rates yet still maintain a relative high proportion of adult males in the harvest and population. © 2011 The Wildlife Society.

The wildlife management institution has been transforming to ensure relevance and positive conservation outcomes into the future. Continuous improvement of decision making is one aspect of this transformation. Managers and policy makers with responsibility for wildlife decisions have an exceedingly challenging job because the set of objectives they wish to achieve is so complex, multifaceted, and often contentious. Many wildlife management agencies desire decision‐making processes that are transparent, replicable, engage partners, and communicate effectively with the public. Using a decision science approach offers a framework to allow agencies to achieve these objectives so the decision‐making process is consistent with their desires. One can point to many excellent examples of formal decision science applications by state and federal agencies in the United States, but many obstacles hinder systematic approaches to decision making. We describe our observations—based on first‐hand experiences—with decision making in wildlife management, present reasons why making decisions is difficult, identify challenges faced by wildlife managers at various levels of governance, and address measures wildlife managers can employ to help overcome these challenges. We acknowledge that no panacea, simple recipe, or one‐size‐fits‐all prescription exists for wildlife management decision making. Nevertheless, we hope that by a) describing how a systematic decision science framework can help agencies achieve their objectives, while simultaneously benefiting stakeholders, managers, and conservation outcomes, and b) providing specific suggestions for overcoming challenges associated with decision making, we will help agencies in the midst of their challenges to improve decision‐making processes consistent with their objectives. © 2020 The Authors. Wildlife Society Bulletin published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc. on behalf of The Wildlife Society.

Public wildlife management in the United States is transforming as agencies seek relevancy to broader constituencies. State agencies in the United States, while tasked with conserving wildlife for all beneficiaries of the wildlife trust, have tended to manage for a limited range of benefits in part due to a narrow funding model heavily dependent on hunting, fishing, and trapping license buyers. To best meet the needs, interests, and concerns of a broader suite of beneficiaries, agencies will need to reconsider how priorities for management are set. This presents an opportunity for conservation program design and evaluation to be elevated in importance. We argue that success in wildlife conservation in the U.S. requires assessment of both decision-making processes and management results in relation to four questions: conservation of what, under what authority, for what purposes, and for whom?

We present a case study from New York, USA, of the use of structured decision making (SDM) to identify fall turkey harvest regulations that best meet stakeholder objectives, in light of recent apparent declines in abundance of wild turkeys in the northeastern United States. We used the SDM framework to incorporate the multiple objectives associated with turkey hunting, stakeholder desires, and region‐specific ecological and environmental factors that could influence fall harvest. We identified a set of 4 fall harvest regulations, composed of different season lengths and bag limits, and evaluated their relative achievement of the objectives. We used a stochastic turkey population model, statistical modeling, and expert elicitation to evaluate the consequences of each harvest regulation on each of the objectives. We conducted a statewide mail survey of fall turkey hunters in New York to gather the necessary information to evaluate tradeoffs among multiple objectives associated with hunter satisfaction. The optimal fall harvest regulation was a 2‐week season and allowed for the harvest of 1 bird/hunter. This regulation was the most conservative of those evaluated, reflecting the concerns about recent declines in turkey abundance among agency wildlife biologists and the hunting public. Depending on the region of the state, the 2‐week, 1‐bird regulation was predicted to result in 7–32% more turkeys on the landscape after 5 years. The SDM process provided a transparent framework for setting fall turkey harvest regulations and reduced potential stakeholder conflict by explicitly taking the multiple objectives of different stakeholder groups into account. © 2017 The Wildlife Society.

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