A University of Alberta ecology professor is hoping a smartphone app will provide more accurate data on moose populations across the province.
“We want to track the spacial distribution of moose as well as the abundance from year to year,” Mark Boyce said. “Currently, we don’t have enough data to really be able to do that, but with the moose app, we get thousands of reports. We get much better data than we’ve had in the past.”
The previous method of tracking moose populations was by conducting aerial surveys.
“Most recently, helicopters are used to conduct the aerial surveys and it’s very expensive. It costs about $60,000 per wildlife management unit (WMU) to do a population estimate.”
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Alberta has about 150 WMUs that have moose. Given the budget, that means each unit is only being surveyed once every 10 or 12 years.
“We have very few data,” Boyce said. “Management decisions are being made basically by the seat of our pants.
“We don’t have sufficient data to evaluate how many should be harvestable within an area or whether the population is crashing.”
To collect better data, Boyce helped launch the Moose Hunter Survey app in 2012 to ask those seeing moose firsthand to keep track of the numbers. Only those who draw a moose tag are invited to download the app.
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“We’ve shown that the counts of moose seen by moose hunters are highly correlated with the number of moose on the landscape, so we can use it as an index of population abundance.”
That data is very important, Boyce says.
“To be able to document trends in abundance and to ensure that we’re not overharvesting… There’s a quota for each WMU in terms of bulls, cows and calves that can be harvested, so a certain number of licences is issued.”
In the first year, the app collected about 3,000 moose reports but by 2016, hunters submitted roughly 14,000.
“Now I think we probably do better in terms of temporal and spacial coverage than we do with the aerial survey work, even though aerial survey is the gold standard for estimating the abundance of moose,” Boyce said. “We have so much more data both in space and time, it makes up for the error associated with the sample sizes.”
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Boyce would still like to see even more data and is kicking around ideas about incentives for hunters to share sightings.
“One of the beauties of the app is you can be in a very remote area — like up in the very far north of Alberta where there may not be cellphone coverage — and you can still record the number of moose you saw during the course of the day. You could be out there for a week and then, when you’re driving home, you drive past a cellphone tower and, ‘bing, bing, bing!’ All the data go into my computer.”
And if that’s not enough to entice hunters to use the app, it also emits the sound of a cow moose in heat to remind users to enter their data at the end of the day.