for those making the decisions that require payments to be made. The need must be 

 rational — be it to comply with legal requirements necessary in order to secure 

 material gains, to gain beneficial public relations, to avoid negative public relations, 

 or to exercise moral responsibility. This rationale is strengthened if measurable 

 benefits can be attributed to the required financial expenditures. 



A third favorable condition is that the consumers or taxpayers collectively be 

 willing to contribute to the protection or replacement of habitat. That condition can 

 only be met if the need and prescribed remedial actions are communicated clearly by 

 those who advocate the habitat protection. 



The final favorable condition is that citizen environmental groups be reassured 

 that the contemplated actions will indeed preserve environmental integrity. 



HOW CONDITIONS THAT FAVOR HABITAT PROTECTION CAN 



BE CREATED 



Several actions can be undertaken to bring about the favorable conditions 

 described in the preceding section. The major ones are: 



1. Creating an atmosphere of mutual assistance. Environmental agencies and 

 organizations have a reputation in commercial and industrial circles for 

 vigorous opposition to any change. That reputation impedes cooperation and 

 might be diminished or even erased if habitat protection efforts were pursued 

 as a means of maintaining net fish and wildlife yields concurrent with 

 industrial, agricultural and cultural change. 



2. Limiting data collection to specific information about the most important or 

 representative species. Time and money resources otherwise required to gather 

 information of marginal utility could then be directed toward actual habitat 

 protection. Evaluation of only designated species also would reduce the data 

 pool and the volume of the final report. 



3. Translating the ecological and biological data generated into information units 

 familiar to decisionmakers. This action would provide each decisionmaker 

 with the option of addressing either the translated results or input data. This 

 approach would also allow fully quantified impact assessments (e.g., how 

 many fewer animals will there be in a particular animal population) and habitat 

 replacement planning (e.g., how much land will have to be treated and how 

 often at a cost of how many dollars, in order to replenish the reduced 

 population). 



4. Focusing habitat loss assessment and habitat replacement projections on the 

 end result or outcome, rather than on the intermediate changes and relation- 

 ships that are challenging enough to career biologists and ecologists without 

 burdening time-pressed decisionmakers with them (unless required). 



5. f^edicting only the consequences of several sets of defined and possible 

 conditions. This approach is less subject to error than predictions of exactly 

 what conditions and associated consequences will exist at some point in the 

 future. The latter predictions are precarious at best and vulnerable to any 

 number of unforeseen events. By matching consequences with prescribed 

 conditions only, more information and thus more bargaining latitude is 

 provided to the decisionmakers who support habitat protection. 



WILDMIS - ONE SYSTEM THAT CAN BE USED 



One system developed recently that satisfies many of the information needs 

 identified in the preceding discussion is called WILDMIS. The name is derived from 

 Wildlife Management Information System. 



BASIC PREMISES 



The following premises were the fundamental considerations upon which 

 WILDMIS was constructed. 



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