An integrated data system for wildlife management

ID 1975 the British Columbia Fish and Wildlife Branch implemented the Management Unit system for controlling and monitoring wildlife harvests in the province. This change in management boundaries should have been accompanied by an intensified data handling system, so that accurate and reliable management indices could be produced for each M.U. This thesis describes a data system that was developed in response to Region 1 blacktailed deer management needs and offers a new approach to wildlife data system management. The proposed system integrates field contact and hunter questionnaire data, and allows managers to monitor the effects of their policy decisions. Management strategies can be tested by manipulating exploitation parameters, such as bag limits and season lengths, to determine their effect on specific wildlife populations. In addition, the system restores and upgrades obsolete data files, thus allowing past harvest trends to be applied to new management zones. Flexibility, for both anticipated changes in resource stratification and unanticipated data needs, is also preserved. Biologists require management estimates for specific areas within M.U.s to manage wildlife effectively at the M.U. level. Each of the 15 M.U.s in Region 1 have been subdivided into between 5 and 32 subunits, depending on area and geography. The total 246 subunits attempt to partition large unmanageable wildlife resources into separate populations of manageable size. A location list or computerized gazetteer was used to automatically assign hunt location descriptions to appropriate M.U.s and subunits. Hew techniques for hunter sample estimates are proposed in this thesis. Mark-recapture methods for determining sampling intensities and the partitioning of large resident areas into resident M.U.s can improve estimates. Different methods for treating multiple mailing stage data are also presented. The data system described in this thesis consists of two parts; 1) the establishment of master data files and 2) the retrieval of data from those files. Five subsystems of PORTBAN computer programs control the input of Fish and Wildlife harvest data and manipulate them into master data files. The information retrieval is accomplished by standard statistical packages, such as SPSS. A hierarchial file structure is used to store the harvest data, thus most wildlife management data requests can be answered directly. The 1975 Region 1 blacktailed deer harvest data were used to test the sampling assumptions in both the hunter sample and field contact programs. Significant differences between resident M.U.s were found for hunter sample sampling intensity, percentage response, percentage sampled, and percentage of hunters among respondents. Significant differences were established in the percentage hunter success in different resident M.U.s and for different mailing phases. The 1975 field contact program produced a non-uniform distribution of contacts with respect to M.U.s. Highly significant differences between the percentage of licence holders checked from different resident M.U.s were also found. Kills for field checked hunters who also responded to the hunter sample questionnaire were compared to kills reported on the questionnaire. Numerous irregularities, including unreported kills, misreported kills, and totals exceeding bag limits, were found and a minimum error rate of about 20% was calculated. Known buck kills were generally (87.9%) reported as bucks, while does were only reported correctly 74.% of the time, and fawns only 48.0%. The format of the 1975 deer hunter questionnaire is suspected to have influenced those error rates. Successful and unsuccessful hunters had different probabilities of responding to the hunter questionnaire. Only 48.0% of unsuccessful hunters responded, while 59.6% of successful hunters reported. Hunter sample harvest estimates using different estimation methods were compared to known kills in two Vancouver Island subunits. During the 1975 season, 88 deer were shot in subunit 1-5-3 Nanaimo River), while 140 were estimated to have been shot in subunit 1-5-7 (Northwest Bay), all estimated kills were considerable higher than the known harvest, with the marked success-phase mailing estimation method producing the lowest estimates — 170 deer (193%) for subunit 15-3 and 179 deer (127%) for subunit 1-5-7. Although the total estimated deer kill for Vancouver Island remained relatively constant from 1964 to 1974, the same data when analysed by M.U. and subunit showed decreasing harvests in some M.U.s and subunits which were balanced by increasing kills in others., The data system proposed in this thesis provides an opportunity for B.C. wildlife management to develop an effective management framework for B.C.'s valuable wildlife resources. However, to do so the proposed system or one with similar capabilities must be implemented and supported by the B. C. Fish and Wildlife Branch.Land and Food Systems, Faculty ofGraduat