RESEARCH NEEDS IN WILDLIFE DAMAGE CONTROL

The wildlife profession has achieved great success in habitat management, game population restoration, and in learning to manage wildlife populations for public use and enjoyment during the past 50 years. However, a number of wildlife species have become serious problems to agricultural profitability and to natural resources managers in recent years. These problem situations may well focus on a lack of appropriate research or perhaps just not keeping pace. For the most part, wildlife research for the prevention and control of wildlife damage has been latently reactive, rather than proactive. Obviously, one of the difficulties continues to be, how to prioritize and direct these research needs. Others include, who is going to do the research and what kind of coordination there is between research agencies, institutions, managers and users