Assignment:
Scenario-Proposal: The Endangered Species Act (ESA) requires a 5-year post-delisting monitoring process to be followed when a species is delisted from the ESA due to recovery. You work for the Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) and have been tasked with developing the post-delisting monitoring of a currently listed species of your choice. See the USFWS guidance document on post-delisting monitoring here
Your plan must meet ESA requirements for post-delisting monitoring and should involve a species currently listed as threatened.
You need an organization that represents a monitoring plan with peer-reviewed sources as well as the The group species that would be involved in the monitoring of any endangered animal. This submission should be approximately 5 pages in length.
You will provide the design-based components of your monitoring plan for peer-review. This submission will become the monitoring section of the report and provides the design-based aspects of your monitoring plan. This submission should detail the following:
1. A recap of your scenario proposal.
2. The general design strategy being used. For example, is the design a BACI design, a CI design, etc. You should cover how sampling points will be allocated on the landscape in this portion, e.g., are you using convenience sampling, random sampling, systematic sampling, spatially-balanced random sampling, etc.
3. Design criteria. Here you should describe specific guidelines that a manager would follow. How many sampling points or plots will there be, where will they be, how big will they be, and when and how many times do they get sampled.
4. Sampling Methodology. You should provide any relevant information on how the data should be collected and what variables should be measured.
5. Concerns and considerations that you evaluated in deciding on the sampling approach you did.
A guiding principle for this section should be whether a reader could extract enough information from this plan to implement the monitoring on the ground without asking for additional guidance. You should support your proposed methods using peer-reviewed literature. You can use existing monitoring plans as support, but because the methods in these plans may be inappropriate, make sure that the peer-reviewed literature confirms the validity of the approach.