Welcome to the 81^st North American Wildlife and Natural Resources Conference. WMI thanks you and all the conference partners, special session chairs and speakers, exhibitors, and state agency sponsors, who are critical to making this conference successful. I also offer special thanks to John Arway and Matt Hough for their welcome to Pennsylvania address.

The Northwest Boreal Landscape Conservation Cooperative (NWB LCC) recently conducted a two-day workshop to begin developing a monitoring system to detect the impacts of climate change and human disturbance at a landscape scale. The workshop, held in Anchorage, Alaska and facilitated by the Wildlife Management Institute (WMI), brought together a diverse range of scientists from Alaska and Yukon Territory. Participants included federal agency representatives from the U.S. and Canada, the University of Alaska, and non-government organizations on both sides of the border.

Lower crop prices appear to be driving strong interest in the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP), but the new acreage cap on CRP established by Congress in the 2014 Farm Bill will limit participation, according to the Wildlife Management Institute.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture's (USDA) Farm Services Agency (FSA) closed the most recent general sign-up for CRP on February 26. While FSA has not released final figures, the agency reports strong interest and notes that there will almost certainly be more applications for the program than they can accept.