Page 5 - HuntingGazette.2017

By the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission
The Arkansas Game and Fish Commission wants to get to know you bet- ter, especially if you enjoy one of the many wild- life management areas around the state.
People who hunt, trap, fish or boat on such areas are now required to obtain a free General Use WMA permit through the commission’s license sys- tem. The permit may be obtained online at https:// ar-web.s3licensing.com, at any license vendor or
by calling 800-364-4263. It can be added as a code to your existing license or obtained on its own.
Brad Carner, chief of wildlife management for the AGFC, said the pur- pose of the license is to be able to find out exact- ly how many people are using the public lands the AGFC manages and what outdoor pursuits they enjoy while on the areas.
“Historically we have done vehicle counts at popular WMAs, but this permit will allow us to get much more accurate data on WMA usage,” Carner said.
The permit is an expan- sion of the Sweet 16 Permits introduced in 2012. The permit por- tion of the program was intended to gather more information about hunter use and satisfaction on some of the more popu- lar wildlife management areas in the state. Other portions of that program included modifications to antler-point restrictions, increased data collection to monitor herd health and habitat usage in deer and disease monitoring.
“One of the greatest benefits we saw from the permits was the ability
to reach out and ask our hunters and anglers about proposed regulations and information they needed to know before going to the WMA,” Carner said. “The free permit required an email address, so we could let hunters who frequented some WMAs know if roads were closed or if deer season on the area had been shut down because of flooding. We also were able to survey hunters on many pro- posed regulations.”
One example of the com- mission using this contact information in the regula- tions-setting process was
the reintroduction of the spinning-wing decoy ban on WMAs. Biologists sur- veyed duck hunters using Sweet 16 Permit infor- mation to find out how many hunters were actu- ally using the decoys and how they felt about the proposed change.
“We want to use every means possible to reach out to hunters and anglers on an area,” Carner said. “And these new permits give us the ability to do that without the burden on hunters to fill out daily passes and other methods of data collection.”
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