Monitoring ungulates in steep non-forest habitat: a comparison of faecal pellet and helicopter counts

Forsyth, David M.; MacKenzie, D. I.; Wright, EF

doi:10.1080/03014223.2014.936881

Cited by 8 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 26 publications

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“…In steep or otherwise dangerous terrain, not all quadrats on a transect can be sampled; for those quadrats, the FPI is calculated by dividing the total number of intact pellets by the number of quadrats sampled and then multiplying by 30. Forsyth et al (2007) showed a positive and approximately linear relationship between FPI and known deer density in 20 enclosures throughout New Zealand, and a subsequent study showed a positive curvilinear relationship between helicopter counts of ungulates (primarily feral goat) and FPI (Forsyth et al 2014). It is therefore reasonable to infer that higher faecal pellet abundances indicate higher ungulate abundances.…”

Section: Design Of the Ungulate Monitoring Within Doc's Biodiversity mentioning

confidence: 92%

“…We therefore conducted an additional analysis of sites in each of the North and South Islands where red deer rather than other ungulates are likely to be numerically dominant. In particular, feral goat (North and South Islands) and Himalayan tahr (South Island) have either excluded red deer and/or commonly attained much higher densities than red deer in recent decades (Forsyth and Hickling 1998;Forsyth et al 2014;Parkes 2021), and hence they could potentially obscure significant impacts of WAROs on red deer occupancyabundance. We therefore used the current ungulate distribution GIS layers (Department of Conservation 2014) to identify the North Island and South Island sites with red deer but not feral goat or Himalayan tahr.…”

Section: Analysesmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Occupancy and relative abundances of introduced ungulates on New Zealand’s public conservation land 2012–2018

Moloney¹,

Forsyth²,

Ramsey³

et al. 2021

NZJE

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Introduced ungulates are an important management issue on New Zealand's public conservation land (PCL). Ungulates are harvested by recreational and commercial hunters, with some government-funded culling. A robust monitoring system is needed to reliably report trends in occupancy and abundance, and to evaluate management effectiveness. We first describe the design and implementation of a monitoring programme enabling ungulate occupancy and relative abundances to be estimated on New Zealand's PCL. Monitoring sites are located at the vertices of an 8-km grid superimposed over PCL on North, South and Stewart/Rakiura islands (i.e. a spatially representative sampling network). At each site, intact ungulate pellets are counted on four transects radiating from a 400 m 2 vegetation plot, with each 150 m transect containing 30 1-m radius plots. We next report an analysis of the first such data collected at 1346 sites during 2012-2018. Nationally, ungulate occupancy and abundance were higher at woody than at non-woody sites, and overall were higher in the North Island than in the South Island. Occupancy odds increased by 34% and 21% per annum in the North Island and South Island, respectively. Abundance (conditional on sites being occupied) increased 11% annually in the North Island, but did not change in the South Island. These increases in occupancy and abundance indicate that ungulate populations are recovering from the lows of the 1980s, likely due to reduction in both commercial harvesting and government-funded control. The data from the monitoring reported here establish a baseline against which future estimates of ungulate occupancy-abundance, and the effectiveness of management activities, can be assessed. Five-yearly remeasurements at the sites, coupled with more comprehensive recording of information on government control and commercial/recreational harvesting activities, should enable the drivers of future changes in ungulate occupancy and abundance to be better understood.

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Section: Design Of the Ungulate Monitoring Within Doc's Biodiversity mentioning

confidence: 92%

Section: Analysesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Occupancy and relative abundances of introduced ungulates on New Zealand’s public conservation land 2012–2018

Moloney¹,

Forsyth²,

Ramsey³

et al. 2021

NZJE

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“…The main prey of wolves in Valais are forest-dwelling, fairly elusive animals (Coppes, Burghardt, Hagen, Suchant, & Braunisch, 2017) whose abundance is difficult to estimate. Conventional survey methods of ungulates include direct visual counts, scat and track counts, trail camera trapping and genetic sampling (Ebert, Sandrini, Spielberger, Thiele, & Hohmann, 2012;Forsyth, MacKenzie, & Wright, 2014;Singh & Milner-Gulland, 2011). Widely deployed, they concern mostly monitoring for estimating population trends (Singh & Milner-Gulland, 2011).…”

Section: Estimating Prey Abundance Under Imperfect Detectionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Deer density drives habitat use of establishing wolves in the Western European Alps

Roder

Biollaz

Mettaz

et al. 2020

Journal of Applied Ecology

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1. The return of top carnivores to their historical range triggers conflicts with the interests of different stakeholder groups. Anticipating such conflicts is key to appropriate conservation management, which calls for reliable spatial predictions of future carnivore occurrence. Previous models have assessed general habitat suitability for wolves, but the factors driving the settlement of dispersing individuals remain ill-understood. In particular, little attention has been paid to the role of prey availability in the recolonization process.2. High spatial resolution and area-wide relative densities of the wolf's main ungulate prey species (red deer, roe deer and chamois) were assessed from snow-track surveys and modelled along with wolf presence data and other environmental descriptors to identify the main drivers of habitat selection of re-establishing wolves in the Western European Alps.3. Prey species abundance was estimated from the minimum number of individuals recorded from snow-tracks along two hundred and eighteen 1-km transects surveyed twice a year during four successive winters (2012/2013-2015/2016).Abundance estimates per transect, corrected for species-specific detection probabilities and averaged across winters, were used to model area-wide relative prey density and biomass.2008; but see Mladenoff et al., 1995); so, clearly, there is an urgent the most profitable prey in the Western Alps, was the main driver of winter habitat selection during the settlement phase.7. Synthesis and applications. We demonstrate the crucial importance of including accurate, fine-grained information about prey supply for predicting recolonization patterns of carnivores and thus anticipating areas with potential human-wildlife conflicts where preventive measures should be prioritized. K E Y W O R D SCanis lupus, habitat modelling, human-wildlife interactions, Maxent, predator-prey relationships, recolonization patterns, ungulate density, wolf | 997

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“…Feral goat detectability ( d h ) using the helicopter survey technique was estimated from the number of known Judas individuals or particular feral goat individuals detected within a MU during a survey, and the number known (expected) to exist. The probability of detection is known to vary according to a range of factors including tree cover and terrain steepness (Bayne et al 2000; Forsyth et al 2014) but these aspects were not assessed during the helicopter surveys on KI.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Eradication of feral goats Capra hircus from Kangaroo Island: estimating the probability of persistence from multiple lines of evidence

Southgate¹,

Lee

Markopoulos³

et al. 2021

Restoration Ecology

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Ongoing support for an eradication program depends on clear information being provided to on‐ground operational and managerial personnel and funding agencies about the performance of control effort. This paper describes the methods used to track the success of control activities during goat eradication on Kangaroo Island, Australia, from 2006 to 2017. A range of techniques were used during the program to monitor the goat population, including helicopter surveys, Judas goats, walking transects, camera trapping, scat count transects, and opportunistic community observations. A Bayesian catch‐effort model contained within a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet enabled data from multiple monitoring techniques to be accommodated. The familiar spreadsheet format made it relatively easy for operational staff to add data and visualize the strength of individual or combined monitoring techniques to track population decline. This provided greater incentive to maintain accurate records of hunting and survey effort during the eradication program. Combined survey effort data indicated there was a 1% chance that feral goats remained extant at the beginning of 2017. This probability was reduced to 0.1% if in another 12 months no further feral goat activity was detected by hunting effort and landholder/manager monitoring.

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Monitoring ungulates in steep non-forest habitat: a comparison of faecal pellet and helicopter counts

Cited by 8 publications

References 26 publications

Occupancy and relative abundances of introduced ungulates on New Zealand’s public conservation land 2012–2018

Occupancy and relative abundances of introduced ungulates on New Zealand’s public conservation land 2012–2018

Deer density drives habitat use of establishing wolves in the Western European Alps

Eradication of feral goats Capra hircus from Kangaroo Island: estimating the probability of persistence from multiple lines of evidence

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