Waterfowl Management Handbook: Introduction

The need for a single source of information about the management of waterfowl and their habitat was originally suggested by the north-central region of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.  Much of this information exists in scientific papers, unpublished reports, or has never been recorded, and thus is not readily accessible by waterfowl managers.  The information in each handbook chapter does not represent a thorough synthesis of all pertinent literature, but rather highlights important information for developing a conceptual framework for wetland managers.  Chapters are brief by design, and have figures and tables to facilitate a rapid assessment of information on a specific topic.  If a manager wishes additional information, the brief Suggested Reading section lists titles of key papers.

The Waterfowl Management Handbook is organized in four sections:

• Waterfowl Ecology
• Population Management
• Wetlands Ecology
• Habitat Management

The handbook was originally produced as Fish and Wildlife Leaflet 13; that is why the sections are numbered 13.1, 13.2, 13.3, and 13.4.  Each chapter here is a separate file in Portable Document Format (PDF).  These PDF files can be viewed and printed across all major computing platforms using the Adobe^® Acrobat^® Reader, which can be downloaded free of charge from http://www.adobe.com/prodindex/acrobat/readstep.html.

The original handbook was produced by Diana Cross and the CD-ROM version by Paul Vohs, Office of Information Transfer, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.  However, that office has been closed and print and CD-ROM versions of the handbook are no longer available.