Our Mission
The Walleye Restoration Foundation mission is to protect, conserve, and restore the Upper Midwest’s Walleye (Stizostedion vitreum) resources for the public benefit by bringing together diverse interests to care for lakes and rivers so our future generations can experience the joy of fishing for walleyes and other fish.
Why A Walleye Restoration Foundation, Inc
We are in a time of natural resource management when there is a collision between protection of our natural resources and providing recreational opportunity. A collision between enhancing our natural resources and causing harm to our healthy environment. We are at a time where Aldo Leopold’s question” When will government conservation become like a mastodon and be hampered by its own dimensions” is defined in failure to adapt the ecological principles he developed.
Walleye Restoration Foundation, Inc Founder
Rand Atkinson
The Walleye Restoration Foundation, Inc. was founded by Rand Atkinson, an aquatic ecologist who has had a career and a past professional association with fish, water law, and lake management in Wisconsin.
Rand's earliest association with the Wisconsin DNR walleye management program was when he was relocated in 1982-84 from the cold-water rainbow trout facility at Oceola Fish Hatchery to the Spooner warmwater fish management program.
Our Approach
Our methods are to approach restoration of the walleye resources ecologically by:
Essays on Walleye Management
The Solution to the Future is the Past
The more we understand nature’s connections, the clearer it becomes that no organism or process stands alone. Yet modern science often divides nature into ever-smaller specialties, producing experts on everything from bacteria to elephants while obscuring relationships among them. Unless resource management learns to integrate those relationships, we will fail to stem the decline of…
A Bigger Picture is Needed Now
Humans have a long history we can now follow and analyze. We have gathered so much information on the natural world that we have affected in so many ways. What good are these inventories if we do use them to solve problems we have created … I mean REALLY use them to restore and solve…
Beneath the Surface – Land or Water
Finally, in 2020’s “Science of the Forest” has progressed to connections with “Science of the Soil”. Aldo Leopold in his essay The Last Stand published in Outdoor America in 1942 recognized this connection in the early days of forest management. It only took eighty years of scientific experimentation to understand his concept the health of…