Goat Habitat Study Uses GPS to Track Animals

February 7, 2003

Wildlife management has taken some high-tech twists and turns in recent years. There is perhaps no better example of this than a Morice & Lakes IFPA-funded project that tracks the movement of mountain goats and assesses their habitat in the Nadina Mountain area, south of Houston.

Laurence Turney of Ardea Biological Consulting has been tracking, photographing and collaring goats in the area, in the central portion of the Morice Forest District, since 1996. The overall goal of the project is to provide guidelines for forest development activities that will improve the conservation of mountain goat habitats and populations in the area. “We need to understand the habitat needs of the animals so that we can incorporate this information into the IFPA and other planning processes,” said Turney.

Houston Forest Products is getting useful knowledge that will aid in their forest planning efforts. Melissa Todd, wildlife biologist with the company, says that the study is asking questions which can only be answered with the use of high-tech tracking hardware. How small, seemingly isolated populations of goats-living on satellite bluffs and creek canyons-are connected to one another is a key study question. Todd would also like to know how isolated goat populations are related to the larger alpine populations existing elsewhere in the timber supply area.

“Answering these questions will allow us to plan at a strategic landscape level for connections between habitats," said Todd. &"It will shed some light on the influence of harvest pattern, road density and road network pattern at a landscape scale on movements between isolated goat habitats.”

The project uses state-of-the-art GPS (Global Positioning System) collars to gather movement information on the herd.

The collars are attached by traditional means: individual goats are trapped using a clover trap baited with salt. Once the trap door closes, researchers are alerted by a telemetry device and head to the site to attach the collar and get samples from the animal. “Gathering samples and attaching the collar usually takes about 15 minutes,”  said Turney.

Once the collar is attached it collects pinpoint location information as the goat wanders throughout its range. Three goats were collared with the high-tech devices in the summer of 2001. “One collar unfortunately failed after about three weeks so the data was limited on that one, but the other two stayed put until last summer, when we flew in to the site to retrieve them,” said Turney.

The collars can be released from the animal using remote control, retrieved by honing in on a telemetry signal, brought back to the office and plugged into a computer. Mapping software installed on the computer indicates where the animal traveled while wearing the collar.

The GPS collars offered up 3400 points of data for researchers to analyze. From this mass of information, the project team selected 140 GPS points to investigate in the goat habitat area. Turney and his crew of six spent five days last summer camped in the study area putting in field plots at the pre-selected sites. Information gathered at the plots included ecological inventory information as well as evidence of goat use, like beds, hair, or pellets.

The plots were located in varied terrain, from typical cliff/bluff habitats to dense forests. “We're somewhat surprised by how much time mountain goats spend in forested areas,” said Turney.

Through the winter months, Turney and his team will be analyzing the data collected so that it can be incorporated into resource management scenarios being developed by the Morice & Lakes IFPA.