User: | Open Learning Faculty Member:
Sept. 27 2017. 20 C. 13:00.
The area I have chosen to study, is a rather large area, home to and frequented by many plants and animals. Unfortunately, Northern BC is not normally blessed with pleasant springs (or summers, falls, or winters for that matter) and the season has been hot, dry, and smoky due to forest fires; not conducive to a decent growth season for plants, which may reduce the number of animals feeding, foraging and preying in the forest and wetland spaces. Luckily, as summer faded into fall, the fires were subdued by the hard work of firefighters and a large amount of rain.
Another benefit of the rain is that it turns the trails to mud and makes footprints, or tracks, easier to spot and identify. Besides the obvious human and domestic canine, there are also black bear and most exciting to me, moose tracks. Moose (Alces alces) are a large ungulate species that are hunted as game, parts of which take up much of the space in my family’s freezers and decorate the doorways of the city’s sheds and shops. I have chosen to study these animals, specifically their traffic and forage activity in the Vanway trail system.
I have documented moose activity in the area with the help of a game camera and the discovery of various tracks. I have also observed evidence of foraging various plant species. Although moose have preferred forage species, they will start to eat more staple and bulk food options as the weather gets colder, herbage withers, shrubs lose their leaves and snow begins to settle. It is my hypothesis that, because the moose have access to such an extensive, open trail system, that the used proportion of available forage will be much higher on the edges of the trail and will decrease as distance from the trail increases. The used proportion of available forage will therefore be a response variable, and the distance from the trail will be an explanatory variable. Distance from the trail is a categorical, or qualitative variable. The forage data will initially be categorical, as it will be recorded as a specific species and either ‘browsed’ or ‘not-browsed’, but it will later be extrapolated to a continuous value of proportion or percentage.
