Assessing the value of monitoring to biological inference and expected management performance for a European goose population

1. Informed conservation and management of wildlife require sufficient monitoring to understand population dynamics and to direct conservation actions. Because resources available for monitoring are limited, conservation practitioners must strive to make monitoring as cost-effective as possible.
2. Our focus was on assessing the value of monitoring to the adaptive harvest management (AHM) program for pink-footed geese (Anser brachyrhynchus). We conducted a retrospective analysis to assess the costs and benefits of a capture-mark-resight (CMR) program, a productivity survey, and biannual population censuses. Using all available data, we fit an integrated population model (IPM) and assumed that inference derived from it represented the benchmark against which reduced monitoring was to be judged. We then fit IPMs to reduced sets of monitoring data and compared their estimates of demographic parameters and expected management performance against the benchmark IPM.
3. Costs and the precision...