Brief Summary of Minutes of Annual Meeting

The WERA-95 meeting continues to provide an effective and unique tool for information sharing among cooperative extension specialists and agents, university researchers, Federal and State government researches and operational biologists, industry representatives, students, and others in the field of wildlife damage management. In keeping with the typical meeting format, there was an emphasis in discussion time and somewhat less focus on formal presentations. This provides more time to develop potential collaboration and/or coordinate assistance on current issues facing participants. The annual meeting is an important means to familiarize wildlife management students with a variety of wildlife damage issues, provide them the opportunity to network with other professionals working in the field, and to promote the field which has an increasing need for qualified specialists to address increasing wildlife conflicts. Unfortunately, no students were in attendance this year. An increased effort was made prior to this meeting to invite universities and agricultural experiment stations, and industry and vertebrate pest control professional associations. While these efforts had limited success, the WERA-95 Committee will continue its practice to reach out to college and university students in other western states, agricultural experiment stations involved in wildlife damage research, industry representatives. Another effort going forward will include personal invitations to universities via active WERA-95 members and participants affiliated with other universities. CSREES may also have funding available to support student participation at the meeting. During the 2006 annual meeting, the committee agreed to cooperate in planning a symposium/workshop on the secondary hazard of rodenticides to nontarget species. The event was tentatively planned for early 2007. In lieu of a separate symposium, the committee made a decision to coordinate a symposium on mitigating nontarget hazards (including secondary hazards) of vertebrate pesticides with the Wildlife Damage Management Conference on April 9-12, 2007 in Corpus Christi, TX. The symposium was very successful, and focused on the proposed risk mitigation measures, risk assessment techniques, and addressed other issues related to regulation of rodenticides. The topic continues to be timely as EPA moves forward to implement rodenticide risk mitigation measures. Formal updates or project reports were provided by participants on nine topics at the meeting. In addition, each participant was given an opportunity to provide a brief summary of their current research or outreach activities, and solicited help or discussion from meeting participants. Participant response to this format remains very positive because it fosters collaborative efforts for rodenticide research, and will be continued at the next meeting.

No publications were produced from the WERA-095 during the past year.