Ducks Unlimited Podcast

VO: 00:34

Welcome to the Ducks Unlimited Podcast RELOADED, where we bring you the best of our past episodes. Whether you're a seasoned waterfowler or curious about conservation, this series is for you. Over the years, we've had incredible guests and discussions about everything from wetland conservation to the latest waterfowl research and hunting strategies. In RELOADED, we're revisiting those conversations to keep the passion alive and the mission strong. So sit back, relax, and enjoy this reload.

Mike Brasher: 01:05

Today, we are rejoined by doctor Jim Nichols to continue our discussion about adaptive harvest management. And and Jim, it's it's again a treat for me to be able to speak with you about this. You have invested all of your career into helping us get smarter, make better decisions about duck harvest management. I hope our listeners realize what a treat it is to be able to hear directly from you about some of the inner workings of adaptive harvest management. It's a component of this enterprise that our waterfowl hunters interact with.

Mike Brasher: 01:33

It affects them directly, obviously. And to a lot of us, it feels to be somewhat of a black box. And so what I'm I'm hoping and I'm I'm confident that we'll be able to demystify some of that a bit. So I just I I do hope our listeners appreciate the treat that we have and and being able to speak with you at length. I'm sure we're gonna have at least two.

Mike Brasher: 01:56

I know we'll have at least two, if not three, and and who knows, maybe even more of these episodes here with you. So thank you, Jim, for joining us again and being gracious with your time.

Jim Nichols: 02:04

Oh, thank you. It's a real pleasure for me. And as I said, I really appreciate the opportunity, Mike. Thanks.

Mike Brasher: 02:09

Yep. Absolutely. On the last episode, we left off where we had introduced adaptive management. You had given us a fantastic definition. We had tried to connect some dots there with how we also use it in some way to learn to make decisions while simultaneously learning about some of our habitat conservation efforts.

Mike Brasher: 02:26

But also acknowledge that as it relates to duck harvest management, we have taken it to a much more formalized level. And so that didn't just happen, you know, that there was a lot of time, a lot of intellectual thought, a lot of capacity brought that was invested in making that happen. So that's where I want to pick up today is have you start by telling us, like, who were the people that

Jim Nichols: 02:57

were

Mike Brasher: 02:57

responsible for fleshing all of this out? I think there were some technical groups, maybe task forces and working groups that were involved in it. Tell us a little about that. I'm gonna assume that you were a key figure in some of those, right?

Jim Nichols: 03:13

I don't know if I say key, but I was involved in it. I can, to the best of my memory, I can talk about it for sure. Adaptive management was sort of developed by a couple of folks at University of British Columbia of all things, a guy named Buzz Hollings and his student named Carl Walters. They're both really smart guys and came up with this idea of how to manage in the face of uncertainty. It so happened the two management areas that they worked in were forestry for buzz hauling and fisheries for Carl Walters, but still they developed this sort of omnibus, this program for working in the case of uncertainty regardless of what sort of management problem you had.

Jim Nichols: 03:58

So when I came to work first in, 1976 and was, all these data were laid out and was asked to build models that talked about the effect of harvest regulations on mallards for example, and came to the realization that just having a lot of data didn't necessarily get you to that answer, I was struggling and kind of looking around thinking about things to do. Now as some of you just gotten out of graduate school, you naturally think of experimental stuff, but of course experimenting with things like harvest regulations are a lot easier to think about than it is to actually accomplish because there are a whole lot of other things that people are concerned about with those in addition to just learning stuff. In other words, learning was not the only objective by a darn long shot, and that's very sensible. So I started reading a little bit of this stuff by Walters and Hollings on adaptive management, and it made a lot of sense to me. And the part that really made sense to me was this idea of simultaneously learning while you were trying to make smart decisions and manage.

Jim Nichols: 05:10

In other words, there would be, you know, one sort of school of thought, and in fact, Aldo Leopold actually talked about this a long time ago, was this idea of sort of experimenting with systems until you learned how they work, and then going ahead and using what you had learned to manage them in the future. So it was kind of a two step process and that's real sensible. But in this particular case, where you had ongoing regulations in a program like this, there was no way something like that was gonna fly. And so this idea of being able to learn while you were simultaneously managing was one that it made a lot of sense to me. Some people call that the so called dual control problem, you're trying to do both things at once.

Jim Nichols: 05:57

So anyway, I started writing about it at the ends of papers and discussion sections and things saying, hey, this would be a neat way forward. And then that got absolutely nowhere, nobody paid attention, and so at meetings and things like this, at regulations meetings, I'd start to mention stuff like that more and more, and talk about it, and every time I get a soapbox, somebody was silly enough to let me talk for a while, I'd always mention how trying to implement adaptive management would be a smart thing for us to do with Waterfowl regulations. And what I came to realize after fifteen years of that is you can talk yourself blue in the face and it can be as watchful sounding as you want and people wander away shaking their heads and saying, yeah, that's a good idea. But there's nothing gonna get done unless you have what we've come, or what I've come to call as a champion. In other words, you have to have somebody involved with that, who that is his or her number one thing to do.

Jim Nichols: 06:57

In other words, they're interested in implementing a program like this and they have to stick with it from first selling people to the program, to then developing it from scratch, and then actually implementing it through at least a few iterations before anything like this can work. So anyway, in our case it was a guy named Fred Johnson. If I've got a minute for storytelling, I'll do that here. So what, Fred was a state waterfowl myologist, he goes to Masters Texas A and M and then went on to be a duck head in Florida, basically he was on the Lake Okeechobee and he was roaring around in air boats and catching Florida ducks and ring neck ducks at night, he was just having a good time. He and I collaborated on some stuff while he was a state guy.

Jim Nichols: 07:47

And then, Fred became a Fed. Basically in 1990, Fred made the change and came to the office of Martyr Tory Bird Management. They recognized him as an up and coming, really bright fellow who was interested in management issues and so the group there at Patuxent that deals with aerial surveys, the banding data, things of this nature, they hired him and they were very happy with that. So anyway, Fred, I'll always remember this, it was in 1990 when Fred went to his first regulations meeting, where after all the flyway meetings, have a regulations meeting in Washington, in Washington DC in the Interior Building, and you meet with various, you know, heads of state agencies and stuff, and you come back, basically the formal regulations are sort of developed in those meetings. Now a lot of the time, a lot of background work occurs beforehand, but basically that's when it's sort of legally happens.

Jim Nichols: 08:49

Anyway, Fred came back from his, from a couple of days of regs meetings in Washington and sat in my office and he made the comment, he said, you know, if regulations are still set in this way by the time I retire, I'm gonna view my career as having been a failure. And so anyway, he knew that I babbled about adaptive harvest management a lot and he started talking to me about it more seriously, as though this is something that ought to be implemented. And I was, you know, as much I, you know, grabbed my pom poms, was as much of a cheerleader as I could possibly be, but still I couldn't help thinking when he walked out of my office kind of fired up that this is really a shame in a way because I don't, you know, I'm betting there's a, there's so much inertia, it would be really difficult to get this thing implemented, but by gosh, he's got the energy out of it, that'll certainly help. Anyway, he did have the energy and the sucker made it happen and he made kind of all the right decisions along the way. So you asked about working groups and technical groups, so one of the very first things he did was establish a working group just to explore the idea of adaptive management, basically to introduce it to a bunch of folks and then to begin to think about how it might be implemented with waterfowl.

Jim Nichols: 10:11

And so this is not something that came from on high. Nobody at a higher level said, Fred, this is something you really ought to explore implementing it. He recognized it himself and he took it upon himself to develop this group. And the group membership was a really big deal. He dragged some of us in from, you know, I was a research guy that was involved, Ken Williams was a guy who was involved in research as well.

Jim Nichols: 10:35

And he made some key sort of invitations to state management guys. You mentioned Dale Humberg, Dale was one, Jim Ringleman who became a DU guy, was one from Colorado, kind of Jeff Lawrence from Minnesota. I ought to remember more of him than I do. But the point is he was interested in sort of open minded state representatives to come and listen to these ideas. He didn't want yes men at all, but he wanted people who would at least pay attention to ideas and consider them carefully.

Jim Nichols: 11:10

And we had Dale Caswell from the Canadian Wildlife Services representative as well. And so anyway, the working groups, my recollection is Fred got them together about twice a year starting in 1990 I think. And with the idea of trying to prepare sort of a blueprint for a program, adaptive management program that might work. We developed to the point where we actually came up with something that we thought would be useful as a proposal by 1993. And in 1993, Sir Fred published a paper in a special session in the North American Wildlife Conference on it, Natural Resources and Wildlife Conference, dealing with how we, sort of a summary of all those things that had gone on in the working group, it's sort of recommending how we might approach an adaptive management program for the harvest of waterfowl.

Jim Nichols: 12:11

And then we had this meeting in South Carolina, Tommy Strange was a waterfowl biologist in South Carolina, hosted this in the old plantation there. But the interesting thing about the meeting was, it was designed to basically roll out this idea to a broader group. And again, there wasn't any sort of buy in by fish and wildlife survey by anybody, it was just Fred and his working group. It was at least, the meeting was designed to see if some other folks who thought hard about ducks and waterfowl and who were also smart folks would buy into it or if they would just say, nah, this is really stupid, just go home and know, you kind of shouldn't have been doing this. So anyway, that meeting occurred in two of the key people, I'm trying to remember if there was anybody else, but David R.

Jim Nichols: 13:02

Anderson, who was certainly one of the pioneers of just about every aspect of modern day waterfront management we can think of, he was asked to render a judgment about this, about the potential for the program. And so was Doug Johnson. Both those fellows were, you know, became all the Leopold Award winners. I mean, they're really smart fellows, but who had not been involved in the development of the process itself. And so what we did is we prepared, we meaning just members of this working group had prepared this report, given the report to Doug and David and to all the other people who were invited to this sort of larger rollout group.

Jim Nichols: 13:45

We made our presentations and then at the end, David and Doug Johnson and I think some other folks as well made their presentations about what they thought of the program. And luckily we, they highly endorsed They thought it made sense and it was absolutely worth trying. They weren't at all certain that it would, you know, that Fish and Wildlife Service could be talked into it, but they liked the idea. So we ended up being very pleased with that.

Mike Brasher: 14:16

So the reaction was favorable there. What were the what were the next steps after that? What what happened then?

Jim Nichols: 14:24

Okay. So so now we had this program and we had a lot of the folks in the waterfowl community that we really respected who thought it might be a good idea to consider implementing this. But having an idea like that and actually getting large agency such as the Fish and Wildlife Service to actually adopt it or to do very different things. And so basically this idea sort of we continued to develop it, the working group, Fred continued to have the working group meet over the next couple of years, but it wasn't implemented. And then in 1994, the hunting season in 1994 and '95, one particular state did an end run around the normal regulations process and got some, I think it was days added to their season at the end of the hunting season.

Jim Nichols: 15:19

And as you can imagine, there were a lot of states, like about 48 of them probably, that wrote to the director of the Fish and Wildlife Service being upset about this. And to the point where the director of the Fish and Wildlife Service was looking for anything possible that she could use to, as a new way of setting harvest regulations where this kind of thing could be avoided. And so what happened is, because we had this approach and we're ready to roll it out, there was a special sort of a one day session with Molly Baty who is the director of the Fish and Wildlife Service at that time. And Ken Williams and I, who were members of this working group that Fred Johnson had put together, actually made a presentation to Molly Baty and some other key people associated with the international fish and wildlife folks. Anyway, made a presentation and I think if we would have said, if we would have talked about anything at all, I think I could have spoken in another language that she didn't understand, and as long as at the end we said this was an approach that was objective, it's transparent, and it's scientific, and it's defensible, I think she would have said yeah.

Jim Nichols: 16:40

Anyway, she, once again, did accept it and said yes, this is the way we're gonna go forward with the next regulation cycle, we're gonna go ahead and implement a program that gets rid of this ability of a state to make an end run and do things completely for political reasons. And so in a sense, I think we just got lucky and because of this occurrence, it created this will, this interest in the Fish and Wildlife Service in doing something that was not only different, but more defensible and objective. And so in that case, we got got really lucky by this by this by this sort of snafu and regular process.

Mike Brasher: 17:26

So, Jim, just to to remind our our listeners this idea of the federal government saying this is the way we're gonna do this going forward. This you know, we we talk a lot about the states and the federal government collaborating in the harvest management setting process, but at the end of the day, the legislative authority and responsibility for the management of migratory birds falls with the US Fish and Wildlife Service. We've talked about that from the very beginning with the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, and we you know, that the states obviously have a vest vested interest in this resource. They're a critical part of this. But the the the that meeting that you spoke about was essentially the Fish and Wildlife Service, again, the agency with the legislative responsibility to manage this resource saying, this sounds like a better approach.

Mike Brasher: 18:12

It will help us avoid some of these problems that we've experienced here this year. And so this is the the federal government decided that's this is the way we're gonna do the way we're gonna do it. Now that's not to say that the the interest of the state and the buy in of the states was was discounted. That certainly wasn't the case because you talked about having some state representatives, some state agency representatives on this working group, and so you realized from an early from the very beginning that it needed to be sort of a collaborative approach. But at the end of the day, that decision on whether to use as the process by which regulation to a set rested with the US Fish and Wildlife Service.

Mike Brasher: 18:52

Correct?

Jim Nichols: 18:53

Yes, that's correct. But your point was an excellent one, I was a little bit facetious there trying to be a wise guy when I said all we had to do was say it was objective and transparent. The fact that we had had these meetings, in other words, the fact that the working group consisted of key state representatives from every single flyway, and the fact that we had undergone this meeting in South Carolina where we rolled it out to a larger group, that absolutely the key audience there was state folks and then smart other folks who knew a lot about duck populations. Those were very very relevant, I'm sure, in her decision to go ahead and implement this. They weren't being being ignored.

Jim Nichols: 19:33

In other words, that was that was very important. This was not a sort of a monolithic thing that was just done by the Fish and Wildlife Service. Without that state buy in, I don't think well, number one, we wouldn't have proposed it. But number two, I don't think it would have been accepted. You're right.

VO: 19:59

Stay tuned to the Ducks Unlimited Podcast sponsored by Purina Pro Plan and Bird Dog Whiskey after these messages.

Mike Brasher: 20:46

Jim, I think at this point, we can step into some of the individual components of AHM. As I introduced here, we want to demystify it to some extent. I think this discussion of how it came about, the involvement of the state and federal agencies collaboratively in investigating and presenting this idea, to me, it's fascinating. I get to learn about some of this. But here in just a minute, because I did think of one other question I wanted to ask you.

Mike Brasher: 21:17

Here in just a minute, we're gonna begin to step into some of the individual components of adaptive harvest management. Let me ask you this question. Were you talked about Fred as being probably the lead champion for this effort. Were you involved in were were you involved much in presenting this this new idea to the state's state agency partners or any other individuals or or groups, whether it be at flyaway meetings or any other groups? And if so, what you know, what was their reaction?

Jim Nichols: 21:51

Right. Yeah. Absolutely, Fred was the champion, the leader of this whole thing, there wasn't any question about that. But yeah, I had a role in that and in fact, that's my recollection is that the, I went to a couple of them, basically we had folks from that working group who were designated to make presentations about the full adaptive management program in each one of the flyway meetings. And my recollection was I went to a couple of them that, either the first or second year after they were adopted exactly that reason.

Jim Nichols: 22:27

And in no case was I the only person there, but I was all, there was usually two or three of us. And once again, the ideas hadn't been completely, they weren't completely new to folks at the flyway meetings because as we said, we'd had in this working group representatives from each flyway, and in fact, they were making these sort of periodic, you know, at every flyway meeting they'd make a sort of a presentation about the progress and sort of the stuff that was going along. That's another thing Fred did, it was just remarkable, there was no way I would have been smart enough to do this, but he had somebody associated with communications, a guy named Dave Case, who, well, he had a group who was specifically involved in communications for natural resources issues, and Fred involved him, was smart enough to do that right from the very beginning. And so Dave was another person who would spread himself around or have folks be sure that they were involved in communicating these ideas at the flyway meetings and elsewhere as well. So communication was a big deal.

Jim Nichols: 23:38

I wouldn't have been smart enough to think of it, but Fred absolutely had that in his head from the beginning.

Mike Brasher: 23:44

Well, Jim. But this time, I think we will start to delve into what I'm calling them here, some of the fundamental components and premises of adaptive harvest management as is specific to this conversation. You talked earlier about uncertainty in how that's that's sort of a pretty key aspect of this, us not knowing with with 100% confidence how the system operates and how it responds to decisions that we make, harvest management decisions being the example here. We won't touch on that too much more at this time, but what I do want to spend some time on is talking about the objective. We've introduced this already, the idea that if you're going to make a smart decision, you have to be pretty clear about the objective that you're trying to achieve, and that's sort of fundamental to this.

Mike Brasher: 24:35

So talk a bit about the objective, either as it operates within this management context, or specifically with regard to what was ultimately chosen in those early days as the objective for harvest management that ultimately drove this process?

Jim Nichols: 24:53

Okay. Well, first, I'd I'd like to emphasize sort of your general point about, in general, why objectives are a big deal and they really really are. And so my claim would be in any decision process, basically everything is driven by the objectives. Notice all the other components that we'll go through, sort of the different actions you can take, the models of the system, the monitoring, some kind of decision algorithm, all those things are dependent on what you set up as your objectives. And indeed that should make sense, mean how can you tell if you're doing a good job or not if you can't measure it against some stated objective that you're trying to achieve?

Jim Nichols: 25:36

That's the whole basis for management. So setting objectives is a big deal, point one. Point two, it's interesting to me that sometimes, well anyway, there's a subset of people who will say, well the objectives ought to be driven by the science, right? And in fact even with, it reminds me of with COVID today, people will often talk about decisions being driven by the science and that's not really true. Decisions should be driven by objectives and objectives are not dictated to you by science.

Jim Nichols: 26:14

In other words, there are things that are part of human values, your values, what you value, what I value, and are placing those in coming up with some sort of thing that we're trying to achieve that seems important to us. And so they're absolutely not driven by science. Now the actions that you take and the stuff that sort of follows can be driven by science, but the objectives is something that comes out of our human values and our minds and what it is that we value. Okay, so for the adaptive harvest management, this was one of the things that I recall a lot of different discussion about what objectives ought to be in the harvest, in the initial working group. In fact, in particular, I remember Jim Ringleman, who was a state representative from Colorado at that time, and as I said later became of course a DU guy, we were all very interested in hunter satisfaction.

Jim Nichols: 27:13

In other words, was absolutely this idea that bird populations had to do well and do well into the indefinite future, that we didn't want to harm them, but there were also, there was very much attention paid to hunter satisfaction and what hunters might appreciate as well. And I remember one of our cases when we were talking about, or one of our sessions we were talking about objectives, and I remember Jim went back and he said, well, in some of this we're advocating that we look at sort of long term harvest, number of duck shot, something as simple as that is an objective. And Jim said, well, wait a minute, it's got to be more than that, it's got to be hunter, it's got to have to do with hunter satisfaction, so let me go back and indeed he went back and did a lot of homework, sent out a questionnaire to a lot of hunters and got some real good ideas about what it is that hunters valued and what they didn't, but his bottom line was that actually harvest was probably a pretty good surrogate for those things that hunters cared about. It wasn't all they cared about by a long shot, but he thought it was a good surrogate for that and recommended that we go ahead and proceed with Anyway, what came in out of these meetings where there was an awful lot of talk about objectives and a lot of discussion, and ultimately what was decided is that we would look at harvested ducks over a long term, and in our case sort of infinite forever and ever time horizon.

Jim Nichols: 28:45

Now why would we say it like that? Well if you say that I'm gonna go ahead and I want to harvest as many ducks as I can and I want to do it over a ten year period, then what do you do on that last year? You kill every last duck you possibly can because you don't care about the next year. In other words, so by putting it on a long term time horizon, it not only values harvest, it not only values the things hunters were interested in, but it also says that every single year I want to maintain a duck population that allows that next group of hunters in the next year to also have some success. And so basically the objectives that was used for the program was to maximize harvest over an infinite time horizon, is the way we phrased it.

Jim Nichols: 29:31

Meaning you're always relieving enough ducks so the duck population was not in trouble. And then there was also, because there had been sort of some goals, if you will, about what nice waterfowl populations would look like. They had been developed by folks who developed a waterfowl management plan a bit, North American Waterfowl Management Plan, a few years prior to the establishment of there was Adaptive Harvest Management, there was this idea that maybe we ought to take into account their goals as well. And so there was something built in to that maximize harvest that said, well, we're gonna devalue harvest when it comes to years when projected population size next year is lower than the goal that was expressed in the North American Waterfowl Management Plan. And so again, sort of main goal was maximize harvest, but with this caveat that when it got, when waterfowl numbers got below what we sort of thought we would like to see, then we were gonna devalue harvest, thereby trying to make regulations a little more conservative when that happened.

Jim Nichols: 30:49

So and there have been arguments through the years about whether or not that was a smarter relevant thing to do, but nevertheless, that's sort of the way things shook out.

Mike Brasher: 31:00

With that discussion about our objectives, let's talk now about one of the other really important aspects of this, and I believe this is referred to as a set of regulatory alternatives. We think of it as sort of the regulatory package, whether it be closed, restrictive, moderate, or liberal. Talk to us about those. What's the importance of having regulatory alternatives in an adaptive management system and specific to this Sure,

Jim Nichols: 31:29

well if you think of any decision process, basically what does the decision involve, what's the outcome of the decision? It's basically, I want to know what action is smartest for me to take at this particular point in time. And so that naturally means that you ought to have multiple actions and the whole objective of the entire process is to select that action from the alternatives that you have that ends up getting you closest towards proceeding toward the objective that you've set, we've already talked about what that is. And so in this case, all we had to do was say something about the different kinds of things that, different kinds of actions that could be taken. Now when you talk about harvested systems, often your mind goes straight to harvest rates, in other words, I could say, well, let's say we have a hunting season that takes maybe 10% of the adult male malards or it takes only 5% of a particular age sex class.

Jim Nichols: 32:29

You know, we can make statements like that but in reality, what kind of thing does the Fish and Wildlife Service do? Well, it can't specify an exact fraction, an exact harvest rate, an exact proportion of birds that start out to fall flight and end up being shot. You can't do that, what you have at your disposal is the hunting regulations. And so basically these were four, what we did was select four different regulatory packages, where basically each regulatory package was simply defined by two key elements, One was seasonal length and one was bag limit. And the idea was here of fair amount of thought was in discussion was devoted to this, but not nearly as much as to the objectives because the idea was just to look at times in the past, so there was a, it didn't have to be this way, but folks looked historically in very sort of lean years for ducks and very very good years, looked at regulations that were established during those times and just based sort of packages then, the four different packages on things that had been done historically when times were really really good, really really bad, and somewhere in the middle.

Jim Nichols: 33:47

And so what came about then were these regulatory packages which actually included a closed season and there's been a lot of talk about the degree to which that was a smarter dumb thing to do, we've never approached it so that's the good news, But that was indeed incorporated into the, I believe, the original set. And then the three that we expected to have the most, you know, that we expected to really be choosing among all the time were a set of fairly liberal regulations, a set of moderate regulations, and a set of fairly restrictive regulations. And again, they were restrictive and liberal with respect to those two key elements, seasonal length and bag limits. And we did so retaining, just for historical reasons, not for other additional analysis or science based reasons, but other than the science that led to the history, but we retained kind of the differences among the flyways that we've sort of using in the past. So in other words, each one of the flyways, Pacific, Central Mississippi, and Atlantic, each had a, when you talked about liberal regulations, they were slightly different in each one of those, consistent with sort of the way past regulations had been.

Jim Nichols: 35:06

But but that was the idea, to just have those mainly three different packages.

Mike Brasher: 35:13

Jim, with respect to the the season length and bag limit combinations that that make up these regulatory packages, the restrictive, moderate, and liberal, What was the what was the analysis? What type of analysis was conducted or what type of analytical work was done to say these are the season length and bag limit combinations that we want to assign to these different to these different packages. You talked a bit about how some of it was based in part on past experience, but what other type of analytical work was done to support those?

Jim Nichols: 35:51

So the the past experience was important in the sense that they were sets of regulations with which we'd had experience and because we had experience, we could go back and actually ask questions empirically. In other words, we could say, okay, with this particular set of regulations, there were several different years that we applied it, now let's look and look at what harvest rates were, what fraction of birds start out to fall fly and end up being shot by hunters in years with those, that set of regulations and we'd have several years to look at. And we had those for these three different classes, if you will, for the liberal, for the restrictive, and for the moderate. And that was the harvest rates that were produced were number one, they were within our experience, we've seen those before, number two, they covered a range that seemed sensible to us. In other words, the liberal regulatory packages were producing harvest rates that we didn't want to, that just, we didn't want to go too much beyond those.

Jim Nichols: 36:57

In other words, sensible endpoints, and so we ended up using those. And the other thing to say is that rather than just saying, well let's pick the number of days in the season, or let's pick a bag limit, and allow those things to vary almost continuously as opposed to having, in this case, three or four packages. Once again, we thought this enhanced our ability to learn in the sense that we would have the ability to see multiple realizations of what happened with each one of these regulatory packages, thereby gaining the experience with harvest rates that actually came from them in viewing that kind of learning is is sort of useful to to proceeding with managing smart learning in the future.

Mike Brasher: 37:45

Jim, that's probably a good place for us to wrap up. We still have a lot to cover, and we'll ask you to come back and join us on another episode. So thank you, Jim. We'll catch you on the next episode.

Jim Nichols: 37:55

Thanks very much, Mike.

Mike Brasher: 37:57

A special thanks to our guest on today's episode, Doctor. Jim Nichols. We greatly appreciate his expertise on adaptive harvest management and making us all smarter in that regard. As always, we thank our producer, Clay Baird, our digital warrior, for all the work that he does on this podcast. And to you, the listener, we thank you for your support of the podcast.

Mike Brasher: 38:13

Thank you for spending your time with us, and we thank you for your support, passion, and commitment to wetlands and waterfowl conservation.

VO: 38:20

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