Conservation of northern bobwhite on private lands in Georgia, USA under uncertainty about landscape-level habitat effects

Large-scale habitat enhancement programs for birds are becoming more widespread, however, most lack monitoring to resolve uncertainties and enhance program impact over time. Georgia’s Bobwhite Quail Initiative (BQI) is a competitive, proposal-based system that provides incentives to landowners to establish habitat for northern bobwhites (Colinus virginianus). Using data from monitoring conducted in the program’s first years (1999–2001), we developed alternative hierarchical models to predict bobwhite abundance in response to program habitat modifications on local and regional scales. Effects of habitat and habitat management on bobwhite population response varied among geographical scales, but high measurement variability rendered the specific nature of these scaled effects equivocal. Under some models, BQI had positive impact at both local farm scales (1, 9 km²), particularly when practice acres were clustered, whereas other credible models indicated that bird response did not depend on spatial arrangement of practices. Thus, uncertainty about landscape-level effects of management presents a challenge to program managers who must decide which proposals to accept. We demonstrate that optimal selection decisions can be made despite this uncertainty and that uncertainty can be reduced over time, with consequent improvement in management efficacy. However, such an adaptive approach to BQI program implementation would require the reestablishment of monitoring of bobwhite abundance, an effort for which funding was discontinued in 2002. For landscape-level conservation programs generally, our approach demonstrates the value in assessing multiple scales of impact of habitat modification programs, and it reveals the utility of addressing management uncertainty through multiple decision models and system monitoring.