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Environmental Studies |
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Moose management in Sweden: High-resolution real-time
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Introduction: Swedish resource management aims to balance the positive and the negative sides of having moose in a landscape with active forestry, hunting and non-consumptiveinterests. A major focus of Swedish moose management is managing the interactions among people, forestry and moose. Research is a foundation for wise management and we manage moose because our society view them a resource in several respects. Moose populations in Northern Sweden tend to gather in forest areas during winter thus increasing the moose density temporally and locally to high numbers. Areas prone to extensive winter browsing of moose mostly consist of economically valuable Scott’s pine stands (clear-cuts or young, regenerating stands). It is therefore necessary to increase the knowledge of moose movement at the regional and landscape level to better understand the movement pattern in relation to available winter browse. These insides will allow a better cooperation at the local and regional level between hunters, foresters and decision makers on moose management issues. 25 female moose were equipped with GPS-GSM collars in Västerbotten county in Northern Sweden (Fig. 1, 2 and 3) on March 1 - 5, 2003. Next round in 2004: 25 female moose were again fitted with GPS-GSM collars.
Fig. 1: Location of the investigation area in Sweden (red symbol)
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Fig. 2: Eric Andersson from SLU is collaring a moose after darting from helicopter
The GPS collars acquire a position every 30 minutes and store them internally for later download. Further, each collar is equipped with a GSM 900/1800 (dualband) module, sending up to seven positions each 3.5 hours as a standard SMS message to a GSM-modem. After receiving a SMS-message, the positions are automatically extracted and stored in a SQL-server database. Using a web page we then extract positional data for one or more moose from the database and show the results either as moving paths or positions together with simple statistics on path length or number of positions on a map. For extraction we use the ArcIMS engine (ESRI, 2002) in the .Net environment (Microsoft, 2003). The project is financed by the County Board administration of Västerbotten, the forestry owners association and the Swedish Association for Hunting and Wildlife Management.
Fig. 3: Göran Ericsson (right) and Eric Andersson from SLU taking measurements from an immobilized female moose
Maps of tracked moose will be presented with a several week delay in order to protect persecution. More infromations about the project and maps of the movements of all 25 moose are posted at:
New test collar on a moose bull On May 16, 2003 a GPS-GSM test-collar with the newest GSM modem was fitted on a male moose in the swedish mountains (figure 4).
Fig. 5: Localization points (n=4499) of the moose bull, connected in chronological order,
For questions please contact: Dr Göran Ericsson (project leader)
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