Furbearer harvests and landscape change in the Rocky Mountain foothills of Alberta.

摘要

Trapping for furbearers remains a popular outdoor activity in Alberta despite low fur prices and extensive industrial development. Using thirty years of marten harvest records, interviews with trappers, and GIS maps of industrial activity, I investigated the influence of landscape change on furbearer harvests. I used an information-theoretic approach to explore reasons for differences between active and inactive traplines and for variation in trapper success. Active traplines had less access, fewer oil/gas wells, and more mature forests, indicating that industrial development was influencing trapper effort. Industrial activity and vegetation type also explained a large amount of the spatial variation in marten harvests as well as temporal changes in harvests. In more heavily developed areas, trappers targeted coyotes instead of marten. The nature and extent of industrial development in Alberta is contributing to the decision by trappers to trap as well as influencing fur harvest patterns.