Project Description
Humans and Brown Bears of Lake Eva, Southeast Alaska: Cooperative Study of Activities, Interactions and Natural History is project that includes support from ADF&G, USFS, the Leighty Foundation, the Skaggs Foundation, Alaska Conservation Foundation, Lindblad Special Expeditions, the Alaska Travel Industry Association, Alaska Pacific University, and Southeast Alaska Wilderness Exploration, Analysis and Discovery (SEAWEAD).
Project goals are to:
• Monitor human and brown bear use of the study area (see attached);
• Observe Brown Bear responses to human use of the area;
• Create detailed maps of the areas plant communities, beach and stream habitats;
• Identify and describe the important brown bear access corridors and the timing of habitat use through seasonal sign surveys and trail monitoring; and
• Deliver reports that summarize demographic and ecological findings, provide recommendations for a trail reconstruction project and associated bear viewing enhancement efforts, and provide natural history information to parties interested in creating interpretive materials for Lake Eva visitors.
Need
Recreation and tourism can provide a powerful social impetus for habitat conservation. Watchable wildlife areas are especially important to this process because they provide opportunities for intimate connections with ‘charismatic mega fauna’ in an ecological setting. At the same time, accessing these areas can degrade the quality of habitat, add stress for wildlife populations, and in the case of brown bear viewing, add stress, or even danger to human visitation.
The Interagency Unit 4 Brown Bear Management Team recently published recommendations that specifically highlighted Lake Eva as a “Human/Bear High Use Zone”. The report suggests that Lake Eva is an “area with enough human use to generate actual or potential problems, including biological problems, relative to bears” (Alaska Board of Game, ADF&G Division of Wildlife Conservation, 2000).
Although human use levels at Lake Eva have reached those of Pack Creek in the past five years (~1,200 a year are guided), there is no detailed plan for how to manage the area. ADF&G is keenly interested in developing a strategy for Lake Eva and can use insights from this study to plan for similar areas in Southeast Alaska. Both the guide companies and the USFS are interested in reconstructing the current trail during summer 2003. Two local conservation foundations and a non-profit group are committed to providing interpretive opportunities at Lake Eva.
The target audiences for this project include ADF&G, USFS, the commercial guides using the area, and local conservation/education groups.
For Southeast Alaska, performing site-specific analysis at Lake Eva is especially timely in light of regional projections for brown bear viewing, which predict continued escalation in demand in the foreseeable future. If this or similar work is not conducted and acted upon soon, increased conflicts between bears and humans are doubtless at Lake Eva, and both habitat quality and human safety will likely suffer.
Four methods have been designed to accomplish the goals mentioned in the project description. They are bear and human use monitoring, behavioral observation, habitat mapping and sign surveys.
Monitoring Use
A graduate student will be monitoring use on site from May 15 – September 15. Information on group type, size, activity and geographic scope will be collected on a near-daily basis. Contact information will also be collected for future survey work. Primary objectives for this aspect of the project are to identify and describe the spectrum of users coming to Lake Eva. The statistics for non-guided use are of special importance as there is currently no information available.
Behavioral Observation
A graduate student will be observing and documenting brown bear behavioral responses to human activity throughout the field season using focal animal and simple scan techniques. The primary objectives for this work include determining the current level of habituation in the bears using the Lake Eva area and extrapolating to recommend potential mitigations to the current use scenarios.
Habitat Mapping
Habit mapping documents the study area’s vegetation communities, anadromous stream characteristics, and other important physiographic features. We use this information to understand what areas within the study area are the most important to bears. This understanding is important to effective management of high use wildlife viewing areas and provides the ecological context for interpretive efforts.
Habitat mapping techniques begin with the acquisition of high-resolution geo-spatial aerial photography. From these images background maps are created to be used with Arcpad field GIS units. In this way geo-referenced on site habitat descriptions for vegetation and stream type can be collected in the field. Vegetation community descriptions have been adapted from Verrick. Stream habitat descriptions have been adapted from USFS standards for anadromous stream type.
Sign Surveys
Monitoring sign provides important insight into bear habitat use by identifying key feeding areas, trail systems, bedding areas, and the timing of their use.
The starting point for sign work is identification of trail systems in the project area. Trail mapping occurs in the same manner as the habitat mapping and relies heavily upon the use of aerial imagery, GIS and GPS technology. After mapping the trails within the project area, trail areas are selected to use as sign survey transects. Sign surveys are then conducted three times per season along these transects and are focused on the distribution, abundance and composition of scat, bear bed, trail and sign tree activity.
The information gathered in habitat mapping and sign surveys would greatly improve the layout of a new trail from the standpoint of reduced disturbance to brown bears using the area, and reduced risk to people wishing to view bears at the upstream falls.
Information from use monitoring, habitat mapping and sign surveys will be converted into shapefiles and integrated into a GIS that will include layers for vegetation, anadromous habitat, trails, sign, and use levels in the project area. Along with the above-mentioned reports, these data layers will provide information resources for planners, user groups and conservation educators.