Caribou Study Provides Vital Habitat Data for IFPA

Feb 15, 2002

A caribou herd that ranges the wilderness south of Burns Lake and Houston is being monitored like never before thanks to new high-tech collars. Ten of the expensive Global Positioning System devices, paid for through the Morice & Lakes Innovative Forest Practices Agreement, were fixed around the necks of caribou this winter in the Tweedsmuir-Entiako herd.

"The GPS collars are going to give us more accurate data and more data," says Mick Murphy, a wildlife biologist with Ecoscape Biological Consultants based in Quick. Murphy began a joint Habitat Conservation Trust Fund/Houston Forest Products-sponsored project in April of 2001 to examine the calving and post-calving behaviours of the herd, in particular what habitats the animals use to give birth and raise their calves during the spring and summer. IFPA funding enables the project to increase monitoring efforts.

The study could have implications for commercial forestry if the animals move through and use lower-elevation forest containing valuable timber. The project will locate and map areas of importance for female calving and post-calving, characterize those at the landscape level and develop recommendations for stand-level habitat management.

Numbering roughly 400 animals, the herd ranges between alpine habitats and low-elevation forest depending on the season. During the winter the herd uses low elevation forested habitat in the Entiako Lake area, east of Tweedsmuir Park. Calving and post-calving occurs in both low and high elevation forests, including islands, in northern Tweedsmuir Park and the southern portion of the Morice Forest District.
He is wrapping up the first year of what's expected to be a three-year study. Murphy began the project by monitoring 24 caribou with VHF radio collars previously deployed by the Wildlife Branch of the provincial government. The Wildlife Branch, Parks Branch and Ministry of Forests have used similar collars for about 20 years to monitor the herd intensively on their winter range and migration routes. VHF collars transmit a simple radio signal allowing field crews to locate an animal and record a location on a map or collect a location using a hand-held GPS device. Since last spring, Murphy had made numerous flyovers in a small Cessna equipped with a radio receiver to track and locate the animals.

By comparison, the new GPS collars offer a huge leap in technology. Fully self-contained, the units record position eight times a day using a GPS satellite fix, and store a variety of data on activity levels. The collars can detect whether the head is up or down, indicating grazing, and will drop off at a pre-programmed date. Crews then helicopter in, and hone in on a signal to locate and recover the collars. Up to one year's worth of data can be stored and downloaded for study. The high-tech devices also come with a high price tag: $2,000US each.

Murphy successfully collared ten animals on the wintering ground this year and is tracking them back into the Whitesail. In a separate but cooperative effort, the Ministry of Sustainable Resource Management have also fixed 10 more GPS collars on the herd this winter for a total of 20 collared animals.

As part of his project, Murphy has also carried out on-the-ground assessments of locations used by caribou for calving and post-calving. Those stand-level site descriptions broke the locations into site series. That information is entered into a caribou suitability model, a computer program used to predict levels of use. Laurence Turney, a wildlife biologist, who represents the Ministry of Sustainable Resource Management on the Morice & Lakes IFPA Scenario Planning Teams, is currently developing the model. "It's part of an ongoing look at the caribou in Tweedsmuir and the two districts (Morice and Lakes)," Turney, of Ardea Biological Consulting, explains. "We're trying to look at all aspects of caribou habitat use and this is one piece of the puzzle." Using the information gathered by Murphy, the model will produce maps identifying forest types where caribou are most likely to be found. Caribou habitat information gleaned from the study will also be programmed into a forest estate-modeling program-the McGregor Model-that is generating various land use scenario outcomes for the Morice and Lakes districts under the IFPA.