Welcome to the 79^th North American Wildlife and Natural Resources Conference. WMI thanks you and all the conference co-sponsors, exhibitors, state agency contributors, and special session organizers who are critical to help make this conference successful. I would like to offer special thanks to Bob Broscheid for welcoming us to Colorado and Jim Kurth and Ed Cantu who also join me this morning in the plenary session.

It is great to see the increased attendance this year. Our federal partners are still suffering from travel restrictions but this is a great turnout and I am glad to see that more federal staff could attend. I think we all realize how important partnerships between federal and state agencies are for the work of conservation. Last year at this conference and the fall AFWA meeting, I heard numerous comments bemoaning the fact that the reduced federal presence diminished the work that could be accomplished by committees and work groups. I know from my personal experience and from my colleagues at the federal and state levels, that this conservation family is strongest and most effective when there is communication, trust and cooperation. It is worth mentioning each time we meet, that the challenges facing conservation today require partnerships among federal, state, and conservation organizations. No one entity is large enough, skilled enough, or funded enough to tackle energy development impacts, climate change impacts, or private land conversion impacts that are occurring almost nationwide. I hope that during this meeting each of you take the opportunity to become engaged and share your knowledge, skills, and abilities with others to advance conservation issues.

We have four special sessions that will follow this plenary session. The special sessions are intended to address current conservation issues and to challenge conventional thinking. Again I want to thank the session organizers and the speakers for sharing their expertise with us. This year, the sessions will address: human dimensions as a new addition to the North American Waterfowl Management Plan, ungulate migration pathways, the relevancy of conservation in the 21^st century, and the Land and Water Conservation Fund. I urge you to take advantage of one or more of these sessions and participate in the discussions.

Each year when I prepare my remarks for this conference and its proceedings, I try to envision my remarks as a small blip on the screen of conservation history. I try to chronicle the achievements of the past year and identify emerging trends. This year again, I really, really struggled to identify achievements. But there were some. The recently passed Farm Bill recoupled crop insurance with conservation compliance, provided a geographically limited but significant Sodbuster provision, and retained the Wildlife Habitat Incentives Program. I know I speak for all of us in thanking the individuals who worked tirelessly on Capitol Hill for years to achieve the best Farm Bill possible. Each provision is important in its own right but will they collectively offset the losses to energy development on public and private land, grassland conversion and field tiling, and the reduction in Conservation Reserve Program acreage? We will see.

In a strong demonstration of cooperation, the Western Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies developed a range-wide conservation plan for lesser prairie chickens that was endorsed by the Fish and Wildlife Service. Recently five oil and gas companies have enrolled more than 1.5 million acres in the plan. The Sage Grouse Initiative, combining federal and state agencies, conservation districts, conservation organizations, private landowners and corporations, and universities, is a monumental effort to improve sage grouse conservation in order to prevent the species from being listed. These two initiatives are models for the future and underscore the necessity of similar landscape-scale efforts for other species well in advance of listing considerations. The lesson to be learned is that proactive initiatives provide a carrot for landowners and companies that fear the regulatory stick of the Endangered Species Act. These efforts have shown that habitat improvement and avoiding, minimizing, and mitigating impacts are successful and sustainable business decisions. The Endangered Species Act contemplated these approaches in its findings, purposes, and policies where it is stated (in part): "The purposes of this Act are to provide a means whereby the ecosystems upon which endangered species and threatened species depend may be conserved?." Forty years after its enactment and 100 years after the passing of the last passenger pigeon, we are achieving progress on the stated intent of the Act ? range-wide conservation.

We hope that Congress will act on the House passed Sportsmen's Heritage and Recreational Enhancement (SHARE) Act, and the Senate sponsored Bipartisan Sportsmen's Act of 2014. In a time when Congressional action and bipartisanship is as common as the passenger pigeon, the House passed the SHARE Act with bipartisan support. The Bipartisan Sportsmen's Act, introduced as a bipartisan compromise of legislation from the Sportsmen's and Public Outdoor Recreation Traditions (SPORT) Act and the Sportsmen's Act of 2013, contains many similar provisions to the House bill and more. When you return home, contact your Senators to move the bill for passage so that a conference committee can work out differences between the versions. The issues at stake include: limiting EPA's authority over traditional ammunition and fishing tackle, enhanced shooting range development, electronic Duck Stamps, a policy of "open until closed" hunting, fishing, and shooting opportunities on Bureau of Land Management and Forest Service lands, a provision that sets aside 1.5 percent of Land and Water Conservation Funds (LWCF) for the "Making Public Lands Public" program, easing the requirements for small film crews to cover our sportsmen's heritage on our public lands and reauthorization of the Federal Land Transaction Facilitation Act, the North American Wetlands Conservation Act, and the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation.

Of course funding for conservation is a paramount concern for all of us. The President's Budget Request was released last week. The request includes full funding for the Land and Water Conservation Fund, support for the North American Wetlands Conservation Act and an increase in the cost of the federal Duck Stamp, an off-budget wildfire suppression account, a request to increase funding for the Fish and Wildlife Service's National Strategy for Combating Wildlife Trafficking, and a modest increase in the Service's operating budget. I believe that most of us in this room would support these requests; however, it appears that Congress won't spend much time debating the request and has other plans for the budget. Senate Democrats have decided not to offer a budget proposal rather they would rely on the previous 2015 spending plan enacted last year and House Republicans may develop their own budget. I suspect that in a year with mid-term elections, the path of least resistance will be followed once again and the 2015 spending plan will prevail.

We all know that public land and outdoor recreation is important to our nation's citizens. This fact was readily apparent during the 16-day government shutdown in October. Last year, the Department of Interior released their Banking on Nature report to highlight the economic importance of the National Wildlife Refuge System. In fiscal year 2011, 46.5 million visitors generated $2.4 billion in sales for regional economies. About 72 percent of visits were associated with non-consumptive activities such as bird watching, hiking, and boating. Twenty-one percent fished and 7 percent hunted on refuge waters and lands. Refuge visitors supported approximately 35,000 employees earning $800 million in employment income. State parks and wildlife management areas also provide an economic boost to state revenues. If we could couple the economic impact of the ecosystem services that these areas provide with the direct economic impacts, we would better compete for the funding necessary to manage these treasured areas.

The Fish and Wildlife Service released Conserving the Future, its vision document to advance the conservation potential of the National Wildlife Refuge System. In keeping with the document's strategy to engage and support others' work for conservation, the Fish and Wildlife Service collaborated with individuals, conservation groups, and state fish and wildlife agencies during the 18-month development of the plan. The major themes of the plan include: relevancy in a changing world, climate change impacts, landscape-scale conservation, partnerships, and science excellence. I am not going to steal Jim Kurth's thunder by describing the document in detail. Jim will do an excellent job of explaining the process and the Refuges' path forward on his own.

During the last few conferences, WMI has hosted agency transformation workshops. Experts in our community have described the need for transformation, the process of transformation, and the goals of transformation. Aligning agency programs and budgets to adapt to changing demographic trends will be necessary tasks to remain relevant to the public. Efforts are underway to expand stakeholder involvement, expand partnership opportunities, embrace social science, and incorporate "quality of life" factors into agency structures, functions, and programs.

How dramatic are these demographic changes? Since 1970, the Hispanic population in the United States has increased six fold to 53 million. Since 2000, Hispanic populations have increased 50 percent while the rest of the nation has increased only 12 percent. According to William Frey from the Brookings Institute and reported in February of 2011, " ? the Census Bureau released its new statistics on the nation's children and school enrollment, and it showed something momentous. For the first time since this annual data series has been released, fewer than half of all the children (49.9 percent) in the youngest age group shown, three-year-olds, were white." These children are now of age to enter kindergarten.

But it is not only Hispanics that should drive our agencies' transformations. All minorities demand and deserve our attention. Look around this room today and see if we are a cross section of the American public. Can we relate to people outside our race, religion, gender, age, or place of residence? Recognizing this disparity and at the request of female colleagues, WMI was proud to have hosted the first "Women in Conservation Networking Luncheon" last year. This year WMI has joined other sponsors of the workshop entitled: "Navigating Career Paths for Women in Conservation Leadership" which was held here yesterday. Even though WMI is primarily a bunch of middle-aged white guys, we get it. Maybe it is because we are a bunch of middle-aged white guys, each with 20-30 years of professional experience, that we realize that the diversity of the American public demands transformation in our profession.

Both Jim and Ed will refer to the changing demographics of our nation. I hope what they say will challenge you to return to your agency or organization with a new sense of urgency, an urgency based on the need to make your organization relevant to the entire population not just those associated with fish- and wildlife-related recreation. Conserving the Future sets a new course for the Fish and Wildlife Service. This course will involve urban constituents in urban settings. The urban refuge concept is essential to connect with the approximately 85 percent of our population who reside in urban and suburban settings. Ed Cantu, from Lopez-Negrete Communications (a communication and marketing firm specializing in Hispanic outreach) will discuss the importance of the growing Hispanic population in this country. He will talk about the need to be culturally relevant to minorities. In recognition of demographic trends, the Recreational Boating and Fishing Foundation has made a bold decision to focus its efforts on outreach to Hispanic families. I would like to thank Frank Peterson of RBFF for introducing Lopez-Negrete to me while I attended a RBFF Board meeting last year.

As a profession we have to become more culturally and economically relevant to our nation's population. I believe the early heroes of our profession, people like Marsh, Grinnell, Pinchot, Roosevelt, and Leopold, had it relatively easy to convince society that conservation was relevant. They had a more homogenous population with which to deal. The great majority of Americans lived in rural areas with strong ties to and an understanding of the land. Today neither of these facts is true. Our challenge is to make the connection between fish and wildlife conservation and the well being of our nation's population. We know that it is true, let's just make that connection.

Thank you for participating in this conference and I thank you for your dedication to fish and wildlife conservation.