SCIENCE AND THE PRACTICE OF WILDLIFE MANAGEMENT

This essay explains the need for wildlife management as scientific experiments to achieve reliable knowledge (Romesburg 1981) and emphasizes that science and management are not alternative processes. I explain the rationale behind the scientific method, the construction of hypotheses and their predictions, and how to test them with manipulations available through the management of wildlife. The scale of wildlife management programs makes them suitable for scientific experimentation (Macnab 1983). Problems such as population regulation and predator-prey interactions are used to show that theory is needed to develop proper predictions.