Monitoring Mesocarnivore Population Status

Monitoring is all the rage. It is considered an essential step in adaptive management and almost every meeting of a scientific society includes a session on monitoring. Monitoring is a requisite of each National Forest Land Management Plan and can be a condition for acceptance of a Habitat Conservation Plan (HCP), as specified under the Endangered Species Act. Despite government mandates, increasing scientific discussion, and the ethical responsibility of doing so, very few terrestrial monitoring programs have been established and considerable debate and disagreement exists as to what qualifies as monitoring, how it is done, and how monitoring data are used to assist decision making (e.g. Verner and Kie 1988, stout 1993, Montgomery 1995, Noon, in review). 2)