A Wildlife Survey Proposal - A Fundamental Component of Wildlife Conservation - Environment Assignment Help

Assignment Task:

Exercise 

Preparing a wildlife survey proposal, A fundamental component of wildlife conservation is conducting surveys. These may be used to describe the distribution and abundance of wildlife and are central to monitoring of species that may be the subject of management actions. A reasonable level of planning is required before going into the field to conduct a survey. This exercise is fully described here but additional resources to guide and assist you are provided on the Wildlife Conservation Blackboard site, and an online session will be run. 

Aims

 This exercise has several separate aims. They are to introduce students to: 

• what is required to prepare a scientific proposal (usually required in a work environment)

• issues relating to survey design 

• issues relating to animal welfare 

• how to design a broad-based wildlife survey. 

Introduction 

This exercise is a necessary precursor to conducting wildlife surveys in the field. It provides an introduction to how to design a survey (where you should go and what you should do), what varied equipment might be available for conducting surveys, and how you should consider the welfare of the animals that you are likely to encounter. Conducting this as a desktop exercise means that you will have time to think the issues through and write about them, without being under pressure to get set up to collect real field data. This is a very valuable exercise because it is quite common in the profession these days to be asked to prepare a proposal for work that needs to be done. This is likely whether you work for a government agency or a private company. Normally it would be associated with preparing a budget for the work to be done as a way of making a request for funding or as part of a tendering process. Commonly, if you are working as a consultant, you will receive a request for a work proposal or tender. This request will take the form of a brief that will outline the work that is required by a client (i.e. a person or organisation for whom the work is to be done). Often this brief will describe the work in very vague terms because it has not been written by a wildlife expert. Also, there may be a budget ceiling that cannot be exceeded. It is therefore up to the consultant to provide the necessary detail in their proposal of the work required to satisfy the client’s needs. This will include a description of the methods, duration, timing and budget for the survey (we won’t be concerned with a budget here). In order to win such a contract, you need to be able to describe the work that you will do in very clear and concise detail. Often, a page limit is imposed on the proposal. Such proposals are also required for research grants and for research permits so it is important that a student who is specialising in wildlife management or conservation (and most areas of science) has a good grasp of how to write a proposal. A proposal is also required before you commence your project work in the Integrated Project unit in third year. A valuable aspect of the exercise is that you will need to make yourself familiar with the kinds of equipment that are typically available for wildlife surveys and with how to devise an approach that gives adequate consideration to the welfare of animals that will be sampled.

Survey brief 

A Google Earth image of a study area has been provided for your reference (see Appendix 1.1). Basically, you will be conducting your survey throughout the area within the circle. This area can also be viewed in Google Earth by typing in ‘Sandy Flat Rd, Cumbalum, NSW’. The western boundary is the Pacific Hwy. (A better map may be provided in ‘Other Resources’ on the Wildlife Blackboard website.) I require a comprehensive vertebrate fauna survey to be conducted of the area so that I can determine what limitations may be present when I prepare a development application for the site. I am particularly concerned about which threatened/endangered species may be present because these are protected by legislation that I must comply with. I require a detailed description of the methods to be used because I know these will influence the adequacy of the information collected. You are not expected to know the threatened species that may occur in the study area for your proposal, but it would be expected that you would find this out as part of your survey. Therefore, a part of your proposal is to state that you will conduct a literature review to determine what species occur in an area (you will only propose that you will do this). Often you can go into a local council office and see whether other environmental surveys have been conducted nearby, or the council (e.g. Byron Bay Council) might have its own database with this information. You would also try to get a printout of which species occur in and near your study area from your state conservation agency.

This Environment Assignment has been solved by our Environment Experts at onlineassignmentbank. Our Assignment Writing Experts are efficient to provide a fresh solution to this question. We are serving more than 10000+ Students in Australia, UK & US by helping them to score HD in their academics. Our Experts are well trained to follow all marking rubrics & referencing style.

Be it a used or new solution, the quality of the work submitted by our assignment experts remains unhampered. You may continue to expect the same or even better quality with the used and new assignment solution files respectively. There’s one thing to be noticed that you could choose one between the two and acquire an HD either way. You could choose a new assignment solution file to get yourself an exclusive, plagiarism (with free Turnitin file), expert quality assignment or order an old solution file that was considered worthy of the highest distinction.