The Conservation Committee of The Wildlife Society (TWS)-Western Section (WS) commenced activities during the summer of 1999, and quickly encountered a profusion of conservation issues in the Western Section reviewing environmental documents, determinations, decisions, and claims made by government agencies, political bodies, news media, and citizen groups. The Committee recognized that it could address only a fraction of these issues. In our experience, recognizing and debating each issue through both the Conservation Committee and the Executive Board will often require more time than allowed by government comment periods and the period during which the news media remain interested. We believe that it will be more effective to establish and re-affirm the standards of professional and scientific conduct that should generally found the issues. This way, TWS-WS members who are more familiar with the issues can use these standards as a collective benchmark to judge the adequacy of professional and scientific foundation underlying documents, determinations, decisions, and claims related to each issue. We recommended to the Executive Board that we develop standards and present them at the Annual Meeting in January, 2000. On October 15th, 1999, the Executive Board moved to have our Committee act on its recommendation. This paper summarizes the preliminary standards developed by members of the Conservation Committee. These standards presented herein are preliminary, and have not been sanctioned by the Executive Board. We expect that this document is just the beginning of a debate on standards that are acceptable to TWS-WS for using scientific and other information when making conclusions that affect wildlife. We invite feedback on the standards presented herein.
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