Moose Management in Alberta
Posted by Vi Hughes on Sep 07, 2016
Tuesday’s speaker was Dr. Mark Boyce, the ACF Chair in Fisheries and Wildlife from the Dept. of Biological Sciences at the University of Alberta. He spoke to us about how his group handles moose management in Alberta. The moose population in Alberta is primarily affected by several different things, natural birth rates, overall health, predation by wolves and harvesting by licensed hunters and first nations peoples.
The need for accurate population numbers is important as it helps determine the number of licenses that can be distributed each year. There are currently about thirty thousand moose in Alberta with the majority located in north west area of the province. There is an annual harvest of eight thousand by licensed hunters, with an additional unknown number harvested by first nations people. The province is divided up into over 160 wildlife units, with the number of licenses specific for each unit determined on the number of moose in that unit. Another factor is collisions with motor vehicles, which killed eight hundred moose in the Beaverlodge area, four hundred and fifty in Strathcona County and smaller numbers in each of the other management units just last year.
In the past the moose population in each unit was based on aerial ungulate surveys performed about once every ten years and then application of a population model to estimate the numbers. The time gap between surveys was due to cost of the aerial surveys, at about sixty thousand dollars each. Several yeas ago, Mark traveled to Scandinavia, and learned that they use a different monitoring system based on collecting daily counts of sightings of bulls, cows and calves directly from hunters, during hunting season. The counting reports are required as part of their hunting license. This gives Sweden, Norway and Finland wildlife management a much more accurate and up to date estimate of the numbers of moose in each area.
In 2012, Mark and his group developed a mobile phone application that would allow hunters to report numbers of moose observed each day, directly to his group. The application was rolled out with a letter sent to each licensed hunter asking them to voluntarily count and report their moose sightings. Since that time the application has become very useful in helping to determine a more accurate count of the moose population in each wildlife management unit. In future, it will allow for a reduction in the number of aerial ungulate surveys needed, and help to save lives of wildlife managers, many of whom have lost their lives during performance of these surveys. This way of monitoring populations has now been adopted by the province of BC and the state of Washington and is under consideration in several other places.
The moose hunting industry brings in about thirty-three million dollars a year in Alberta, which has to be balanced against the cost of motor vehicle collisions, at twenty-three million dollars a year, plus foraging damage to farmer’s crops. Better management of the population in each area will help to reduce damages and allow for greater sustainability of the moose population in Alberta.