February 10, 2022 at 11:58 a.m.
Wolf management plan presented to Natural Resources Board
Target population number not included
Wolf management plan presented to Natural Resources Board
A committee has been working on updates to this plan since early last year, he explained. The committee is made up of individuals representing a diverse array of interests in wolves and wolf management. The committee included stakeholder seats for which groups could apply. Other groups, such as government agencies and tribal interests, were also invited to hold a seat on the committee. Each stakeholder group had up to six seats available on the committee. In the end, the committee was comprised of 29 groups, Johnson said.
Last spring, a public input survey was launched on the DNR website. The tool, he said, was not meant to be a scientific study but rather a way to gain broad public input on wolves. This was used as a guide to discover important topics in wolf management as well as to define commonalities and differences in public opinions among and between various groups. A summary of this information is available on the DNR website.
The committee met for a series of four meetings throughout the summer and into the fall. The meetings were led by a professional facilitator who also created pre-work for the members prior to each meeting. This was done in an effort to give each seat a voice and communicate all of the needed information for each planning step in each of the six-hour meetings. The report from the efforts of this committee is now being used to created an updated draft of the plan, Johnson told the board.
The public input period should open in February, he added. That input will be taken into account when finalizing the draft of the plan that will be presented to the board. While the timeline listed June 2022 as the month in which the plan would be presented to the board, Johnson said the hope is to have it ready for the April or May meeting.
The plan was created from a number of sources, he said. It came from not only committee and public input but also the best available science as well as the partial draft plan from 2015 created by the wolf advisory committee. That committee worked on the plan during that delisting, but "did not cross the finish line," according to Johnson.
That plan was used as a non-binding reference point. He said there was a desire to recognize the work done by that group, but that needed to be tempered with the fact the draft was already eight years old when the new committee took it up last year.
The plan will be broken into four sections. After an introduction regarding how the plan was created, the first section, Johnson said, would be Grey Wolf Ecology and Population Dynamics. This section would be a scientific overview of the species.
From there, section two would look at Human Dimensions and Cultural Significance. This section would detail not only a review of scientific literature but also public attitudes towards wolves in the state. It would also include tribal perspectives and the significance of the species in the state. Input from all 11 tribes would be included in this section. This perspective, he said, is an important human component of wolf management.
Section three would be titled Gray Wolves in Wisconsin. This section, he said, is essentially the story of wolves in the state. This would include population monitoring and a review of population management. Also included in this section would be human-wolf conflict and public outreach throughout the years.
Section four, Gray Wolf Management, Conservation and Stewardship 2022-2032: a plan for the future, would be the policy portion of the plan, according to Johnson. It is to contain objectives, strategies and products to guide wolf management. The input and science gathered, he said, will guide this section as it is created.
Johnson said each stakeholder group was asked to provide the committee withtheir top five issues and concerns as they relate to wolf management in the state. From there a list of 132 items was created. The items were grouped into nutshells, or broad topic areas. Some of the top items to address that came out of that process included exploring ways to minimize human-wolf conflicts, including overall ecosystem health and sustainability of the wolf population in the plan, and supporting state-based management of wolves, to include regulated hunting and trapping.
The committee also looked at research needs as proposed in the 2015 draft. There was a clear desire to conduct another social science survey in the state, Johnson said, as well as taking a closer look at impacts of regulated harvest on the wolf population. Evaluation and refinement of the wolf monitoring program was also called for by the committee. Boundaries and population management frameworks were also scrutinized.
The future of the wolf advisory committee was also a topic. There are currently two committees, one is the advisory committee and the other the management plan committee. A discussion ensued regarding how to best combine these two committees into one cohesive unit while keeping all voices at the table. This, Johnson said, will also be addressed in the plan.
Johnson also provided an update on the department's wolf monitoring efforts. This has been done through winter tracking surveys. Tribal, USDA and DNR biologists as well as certified trackers have been active in these surveys over the years, he said. The goal, he said, has always been to conduct three surveys in each tracking block in wolf range in the state. Last year, 375 surveys were completed, which included over 12,000 linear miles of snow tracking effort. Radio-collared wolves are also located throughout the state, he said. All of this data is used to inform the occupancy model used to estimate wolf population. Johnson expected to have an updated wolf population estimate by this summer.
Board member Bill Bruins asked how the population number estimate would be used in the final wolf management plan. Johnson said it was largely informational and he did not see it guiding the plan's completion.
"It seems like, in your presentation, you were talking about a projected population goal like the plague," Bruins said. "So can we safely assume your wolf management plan will not include a population goal for the state?"
"It's a tough one to answer at this point," Johnson said. Many groups wanted to see a target number throughout the committee meetings, he said, while other groups wanted more of an outcome-based objective. There was even some discussion about blending those two together. There was a feeling the state could use a specific number as well as focusing on desirable outcomes. He said that discussion would be used in the weeks ahead to develop what that might look like.
Board member Terry Hilgenberg said the board would see either a number or a range from the upcoming final plan. He felt this would be important to the board when setting quotas and informing management decisions.
Board member Greg Kazmierski asked if the plan was to manage wolves in much the same way as bear and deer in that the population objective would be set, and the metrics available to make those management decisions. In the case of bear and deer, population objectives in each management unit are set as increase, decrease or maintain. This is an outcome based objective, which Johnson said is one line of thought under consideration in creating the plan. Measurable targets, too, he said, were also part of the discussion.
"I call it management by pain. If we are feeling the pain, we need to move the population downward until the pain is alleviated," Kazmierski said. He said a numbers-based model would assist in hitting these targets. He also asked if "the feds" would go along with the plan without an actual target number of wolves in the state. Johnson said there was a federally posted delisting criteria of maintaining 250 wolves and state criteria of 350 or 300 and he saw those as being included. He felt the focus was on making sure the population remained healthy rather than having a specific number.
"Defining what a healthy population is is a difficult thing to do, but I think you kind of know when you see it, especially the population were to get to a low number or the trends were indicating a dropping population," Johnson said.
Kazmierski also asked for the plan to take into account predation on other species. He felt this was important in setting population objectives. Johnson said that was a loud theme through the public input process last spring as well as in the planning committee itself. As to whether it would be one of the metrics used in setting population objectives, Johnson said he could not say. He would only say it could be considered.
Beckie Gaskill may be reached via email at [email protected].
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