For the last 2.5 years in fulfillment of my Masters in Wildlife Biology at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, I have been researching the biological and human component of two key moose hunters (wolves and humans) within the Yukon Flats. I am happy to say that the full thesis is is completed and that I will be graduating in December! In my eyes, a critical next step is to make the results of this work public. Hence, I will be dedicating four blog entries to the subject. This first installment will introduce  the biology of the region, study area, and my research questions. My next installment will examine access of subsistence hunters to moose within the region. Following that I will look at movement of wolves in the region, and I will conclude by looking at areas were the likelihood of competition between wolves and humans for moose is highest.

I conducted my research on human hunters and wolves in the Yukon Flats, Alaska. The predator-prey relations in Yukon Flats are unique because wolves and subsistence users pursue low-density moose that are held at a low-density equilibrium from predation. In fact, moose are at some of the lowest densities in the world (<0.20 moose per square kilometer).

Broadly I was interested in:

1. How do human hunters and wolves utilize their environment when pursuing moose?
2. How does understanding space use and movement and of humans and wolves pursuing moose help us understand competition for a scarce resource they rely on?

The Yukon Flats National Wildlife Refuge is located in central Alaska, and extends nearly 220 miles east to west and 120 miles north to south.  It falls directly into a the boreal forest, which means if you walk around that you’ll find birch, black spruce, white spruce, alder and willow. Its namesake is the Yukon River which bisects the Flats, and the huge watershed of the Yukon River is fed by a plethora of rivers. In short, it is a water dominated system.

Within the Yukon Flats there are several communities that are defined by their reliance on the land to harvest food, fuel, and fiber. Their subsistence lifestyle provides up to 85% of the resources they use including but not limited to moose, fish, and waterfowl. Since moose are such low densities but are critical for humans and moose,  it is interesting to research how moose are pursued, and where the likelihood of competition between humans and wolves in the highest. Answering any of those questions pertinent for managers.  My thesis integrated spatially explicit (i.e., locations) datasets of moose (Alces alces) hunters and of wolves (Canis lupus) to ultimately evaluate how two predators pursue a common resource, moose.

To this end, Chapter 1 of my thesis will be the second installment on this blog and focus on quantifying rural hunter access in the Yukon Flats, Alaska, through spatially-linked interviews. I chose this research topic because previous studies have only qualitatively surmised use area for subsistence resources by drawing boundaries around use areas. However, a quantitative approach can yield firmer management information. My novel approach provided pertinent insight into resource use for our system and created a method that may be applied to other systems. Using results generated from subsistence hunter interviews, I applied a model of access to moose hunting areas. Harvest reporting is low among the subsistence communities in our study, and from our results we generated an estimate of harvest based on game densities similar to the best data available on reported harvest. As such, my method may provide an alternative to, or supplement, harvest-ticket reporting.

In Chapter 2, I characterized movement paths (i.e., hunt paths) between moose kills by six packs in the Yukon Flats. The results of that work will be the third installment on this blog. The movements of wolves have been studied and documented in many high prey-density systems, but almost no information exists on their movements when prey is just dense (<0.20 /km²) enough for wolves to survive.

Finally, I will tie what I learned about wolf movement and human access to examine where competition between humans is the most likely. At that time, I hope to provide a full copy of the thesis for comprehensive reading of the research. I look forward to sharing this information with you, please feel free to ask questions!