Boreal Caribou and Wood Bison Population Monitoring

Wed, 01 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Clients: Environment and Climate Change Canada, Province of Alberta

Reliable estimates of survival and recruitment are essential for managing species at risk, yet the analytical methods have historically been inconsistent across jurisdictions. Poisson Consulting developed two peer-reviewed R package suites to address this gap.

bbousuite (Dalgarno et al., 2025, Journal of Open Source Software) provides a standardized Bayesian workflow for estimating boreal caribou adult female survival and calf recruitment from hunter-based monitoring data. The suite handles common data-quality challenges, including small sample sizes, missing observations, and variable survey effort, and produces the estimates required for federal recovery planning.

bisonpicsuite (Hill, Choquette & Kortello, 2025, Journal of Open Source Software) applies similar principles to estimate wood bison population parameters from remote camera data, building on earlier state-space population modelling of the Mackenzie Wood Bison herd in the Northwest Territories.

Together, these tools demonstrate how purpose-built, open-source software can improve the consistency and transparency of wildlife monitoring across agencies and jurisdictions.

Wolverine Ecology in Western Canada

Sat, 01 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Wolverines are wide-ranging, low-density carnivores increasingly threatened by habitat fragmentation and climate change. Poisson Consulting team members have been at the forefront of wolverine research in the Columbia Mountains of British Columbia for over a decade, combining bait-station surveys, GPS telemetry, camera trapping, and genetic sampling.

Key contributions include estimating detection factors at bait stations to improve survey design (Kortello et al., 2024, Ecosphere), mapping winter distribution mechanisms across a complex mountain landscape (Kortello et al., 2019, Wildlife Biology), and assessing the sustainability of trapping harvest in southern Canada (Mowat et al., 2020, The Journal of Wildlife Management).

This field-based program fed into a global synthesis on wolverine conservation ecology (Fisher et al., 2022, Global Ecology and Conservation), providing applied insights on how monitoring and harvest management can support the persistence of this climate-sensitive species in a warming world.

Wildlife | Poisson Consulting

Boreal Caribou and Wood Bison Population Monitoring

Wolverine Ecology in Western Canada