Rebuilding Wetlands and Waterfowl Resources in North and South America - Restorative Redevelopment of Devastated Ecocultural Landscapes - page 145

Partner networks are the key to Ducks Unlimited's continuing success in wetland
conservation. In particular, because the vast majority of wildlands in North America
are in private ownership, it becomes essential to bring these individuals on board in
order to establish landscape-wide protection and restoration endeavors that will be
sustainable through time. In this regard, there is an obvious parallel to the situation
in southern Iraq, where land abutting the marshes is held in a complex mosaic of
diverse ownership of pastoral and agrarian uses.
The guiding document by which Ducks Unlimited delivers its work is its
International Conservation Plan (Ducks Unlimited 2008), which provides a frame-
work that helps direct on a day-to-day basis where to work in response to ecologi-
cal threats and needs. Additionally, Ducks Unlimited operates within the guidelines
advanced in the North American Bird Conservation Initiative, a plan constructed
by ornithological expertise from across the continent in an attempt to highlight key
regional landscape typologies and areas where work should be directed. From this,
Ducks Unlimited created its own North American landscape tableau, and in each
region they provide a general description, identify its importance to waterfowl, list
other wildlife values, investigate existing conservation programs, establish goals,
recognize assumptions, and formulate strategies for action (Young and Batt 2004).
This strategy enables Ducks Unlimited to establish priorities for its work based on
population levels, priority species, habitat conservation needs, and emerging threats
and opportunities.
REGIONAL MANAGEMENT PRIORITIZATION
Even given Ducks Unlimited's generous financial resources (in the range of tens
of millions of dollars to be spent annually), funds are nonetheless finite and it's
important to make sure the organization can deliver its conservation work in the
most important areas. And so, when Ducks Unlimited makes choices about where
it is going to work (and there always are choices), all of it clearly can't get done
and therefore it considers carefully where to best direct its efforts (Young and
Batt 2004).
As a result, different areas are assigned varying levels of priority based on a suite
of criteria. The number-one priority areas in North America are the boreal forest of
Canada; the prairie pothole region spanning both Canada and the United States; the
central valley of California which, comparable to Iraq, has “lost” over 90 percent
of its wetlands; and the Gulf Coast marshes. The number-two priority areas include
the Pacific Northwest, the Great Lakes, and the great plains of the central part of the
continent. Number-three and -four priority areas are more broadly distributed. The
important thing to carry away from these four different priority areas is that Ducks
Unlimited is adopting an approach whereby they're delivering conservation in virtu-
ally every province and state in Canada, the United States, and Mexico. And within
each of these different priority areas, Ducks Unlimited is adopting an adaptive man-
agement approach allowing progress in its conservation work to be measured at a
spatial scale of preparedness to enable the modification of management strategies
based upon knowledge gained along the way (Young and Batt 2004).