Gord Stenhouse, Program Lead of the FRI Grizzly Bear Program, co-organized and participated in a grizzly bear trend monitoring workshop in Waterton Park, Alberta on February 28 and 29, 2012.
It had been about six years since the last workshop was held in Radium, BC on this topic and a great deal of work by many individuals and organizations has occurred since the first workshop. Although the research community and managers can await the journal papers from this work it was thought it would be very useful to convene a second workshop to focus on what research has been undertaken and what has been learned from the different efforts in each jurisdiction.
The first day of this workshop focused on presentations by invited speakers (see below) on the results of their trend monitoring efforts in a number of jurisdictions.
Rick Mace, Results of NCDE telemetry based monitoring project
Kate Kendall, Results to date of NCDE Rub Tree Monitoring Project
Garth Mowat, Results of BC south Rockies grizzly bear monitoring project
Mike Sawaya, Banff National Park rub tree, DNA hair snag monitoring effort.
John Boulanger, Review of recent DNA based monitoring projects, combination designs
Day two involved discussions around two population units in Alberta where advice from the participants was provided. (Castle and Yellowhead BMA’s).
We are now in the final stages of completing the workshop summary report and will be posting this to our website in the near future.