The prototype focused on the ESH acreage goals necessary to offset jeopardy to the interior least tern and piping plover, and the potential construction methods, timing, and outputs over the next 20 years.  The SDM exercise helped team members focus on the most critical factors in habitat creation, and provided hands-on experience thinking through and applying basic models to better investigate relationships between budget, construction methods, habitat acreage, bird response, and river levels.  Using those models, the team developed much greater comfort with evaluating potential options, exploring varying levels of allocated dollars, created habitat, bird-nesting success, river stages, and the effects of stochasticity on any/all the above.  Critical to the workshop were the “coaches,” agency and academic staff with expertise in SDM and the modeling tools (i.e., computer skills).  This was important to facilitate group discussions and develop and run simple spreadsheet models that can be such an important component in rapid prototyping. These resources are generally not available to field staff.  Every team at the workshop echoed the importance of the coaches’ contributions, and noted they could not have accomplished what they did without input and guidance by the coaches and instructors.  The workshop provided an ideal mix of real world problem-solving and training in SDM processes.