Science Applications

The mission of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (Service) is working with others to conserve, protect, and enhance fish, wildlife, plants, and their habitats for the continuing benefit of the American people. To provide the best resource management, the Service uses a science-based, adaptive framework for setting and achieving broad-scale conservation objectives that strategically address the problems fish and wildlife will face in the future. This framework, called Strategic Habitat Conservation, is based on the principles of adaptive management and uses population and habitat data, ecological models, and focused monitoring and assessment efforts to develop and implement strategies that result in measurable fish and wildlife population outcomes. This process uses the best available scientific information to predict how fish and wildlife populations will respond to changes in the environment, thus enabling the Service and its state, tribal, and other partners to focus habitat conservation and other management activities where they will be most effective. In addition, the Service must provide focused, applied science directed at high impact questions surrounding threats to fish and wildlife resources for which management and/or mitigation is required to maintain species at healthy, sustainable, desired levels. The Service must base its decisions on the best science available, in order to defend its regulatory decisions, biological opinions and species conservation recommendations to land managers.