The Habitat and Population Evaluation Team (HAPET) was established to conduct waterfowl population and habitat monitoring, program assessment, and support landscape-level conservation delivery for refuges (NWRs and Wetland Management Districts) and the Prairie Pothole Joint Venture within the Prairie Pothole Region of Minnesota, Montana, Iowa, North Dakota, and South Dakota. HAPET has since evolved to include many other migratory bird issues as well as assist or lead special projects associated with other trust resources for the Service. HAPET’s role is to conduct and support scientific investigations, data gathering, and analyses that focus on solving priority problems and issues that are generally landscape-oriented and appropriate for solving with spatially explicit information, analyses, and associated technologies.
The mission of the HAPET Office is to support the Fish and Wildlife Service, and the greater conservation community, with effective integration of science, planning, and delivery to conserve and manage trust resources, especially migratory birds. In meeting its core mission, HAPET is committed to delivering science and planning necessary to assist in addressing Regional Priorities in the conservation of trust resources of the Service. The HAPET office will achieve this mission by providing science support to conservation programs that address key limiting factors on populations and associated habitat of priority trust species with primary focus on species/issues associated with migratory bird joint ventures and secondarily with other partnerships geographically overlapping Regions 3/6. Primary responsibilities include, but are not limited to;
1) Prioritizing areas for conservation efforts to benefit wildlife populations,
2) Supporting the development and application of models to identify and prioritize areas for conservation efforts,
3) Guiding strategic habitat conservation by monitoring and guiding conservation of migratory bird populations, and
4) Enhancing the efficiency and effectiveness of land and wildlife conservation by developing computer applications to be used by the National Wildlife Refuge System.
HAPET was established in 1989 with the primary mission of coordinating the Four-Square-Mile breeding waterfowl survey and developing landscape-scale models to direct waterfowl conservation efforts in the Prairie Pothole Region. Since then, HAPET has expanded its role to include other taxonomic groups (e.g., grassland birds, shorebirds, marshbirds and threatened and endangered species) as continental planning initiatives have been developed for these birds. HAPET uses leading edge Geographic Information System (GIS) technology to integrate biology with landscape ecology and develop spatially explicit models and tools to solve landscape level conservation problems.