College Credit:  2 semester hours                       

Who Should Attend:  Personnel whose responsibilities include implementation of the Endangered Species Act, particularly candidate conservation, recovery, interagency consultation and Habitat Conservation Plans.  To gain the full benefit of this course, participants should have taken "Scientific Principles and Techniques for Endangered Species Conservation" (ECS 3138) and "Sampling Design for Field Studies"(FIS 4103) or similar college courses (see the NCTC catalog course descriptions).

Length:  5 days/36 hours

Objectives:  By the end of this session, the participant will be able to;

• Describe monitoring and adaptive management;
• Discuss the relationships of monitoring and adaptive management mandates to the ultimate goal of endangered species recovery and delisting;
• Identify requirements and opportunities to use monitoring and adaptive management with ESA;
• Determine the questions to ask for monitoring all aspects of candidate conservation, consultation, HCP, and recovery efforts;
• Design an analysis that links the sampling design to the questions;
• List and describe the steps of a conceptual framework of monitoring and adaptive management;
• Determine what parameters to measure and which measuring techniques are applicable, and how to use these techniques;
• Assess how to ensure quality control, manage data, and apply results; and
• Identify strategies to overcome challenges and to achieve success.