The program steering committee for the 83rd North American Wildlife and Natural Resources Conference has announced the event's four special sessions. The conference will be held March 26-30, 2018, at the Hilton Norfolk the Main, in Norfolk, Virginia. The four special sessions will be held concurrently on Wednesday, March 28 and will directly follow the conference's opening session that morning.

Monarch butterflies were petitioned for listing under the federal Endangered Species Act (ESA) in 2014, and by June of 2019, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service will be deciding whether monarchs should be listed under the Act. The Midwest Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies (MAFWA), in collaboration with National Wildlife Federation, Pheasants Forever, Monarch Joint Venture, the Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies, and other partners, is developing a Mid-America Monarch Conservation Strategy that will provide a framework for implementing, coordinating, and tracking monarch conservation efforts in at least 16 states. The strategy will be based on voluntary, incentive based approaches with a goal to proactively avoid monarchs becoming listed under the federal ESA. Individual states are developing state-level management plans that will inform the strategy.

Statistician George Box famously said, “All models are wrong; some models are useful.” To that, it’s important to add that even useful models can only be applied to the context for which they were intended. Consider this example. Between 1965 and 1969, Boeing engineers built and used dozens of models to design and test the airframe, engines, and other attributes of the first wide-body jet, the 747. One such model was a mock cockpit mounted on a scaffold atop a truck to assess pilots’ ability to taxi the huge aircraft from a position high above the tarmac. The model was useful for that purpose, but no one would have suggested it could transport 416 passengers from New York to Los Angeles. Perhaps it is time we apply the same thinking to get beyond arguments about the North American Model of Wildlife Conservation (NAM).

Many state fish and wildlife agencies know how important it is to develop and maintain strong relationships with industry partners – particularly those partners who contribute 10 or 11 percent of their sales to the Wildlife and Sport Fish Restoration Funds. However, there is one action that agency leadership and staff might consider when trying to build and/or strengthen these relationships. Credited to Jim Curcuruto with the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF), this activity is becoming known as “Partner with a Payer” and there are some great examples where it has been successful over the past year.