In February 2004 at Port Aransas, Texas, Partners in Flight (PIF) and representatives from the other NABCI bird initiative met to discuss the process of stepping down PIF continental population objectives (Rich et al. 2004) to regional and local scales. Participants also discussed rolling up local population estimates and targets to assess the feasibility of the landscape changes necessary to meet continental objectives. Since the process of stepping-down/rolling-up population objectives shifts focus from identifying priority species to formulating quantitative estimates of how much habitat was needed, where, and by when the Port Aransas group called the stepping-down/rolling-up process a??stepping forward.a?? Participants agreed that stepping forward objectives was the beginning of an inevitably iterative dialog necessary to evaluate the assumptions of PIF population estimates and objectives as well as the methods used to monitor local implementation. To facilitate the translation of continental population objectives into biologically sound, measurable regional and local population-based habitat targets the Port Aransas group recommended a process no commonly referred to as the Five Elements Processa?|
