Comments on Brodie and Post: Harvest effort: the missing covariate in analyses of furbearer harvest data

摘要

In a recent article, Brodie and Post (2010) present a study intending to examine the relationship between climate change and wolverine (Gulo gulo) populations from six Canadian jurisdictions (BC, AB, SK, MB, YT, and NT). The authors used winter snowpack as a measure of climate change and pelt export data from each jurisdiction as a measure of wolverine population abundance. Pelt export figures were obtained from Statistics Canada, and these are normally very consistent with annual harvest levels of the various furbearers in each jurisdiction, as indicated by Brodie and Post (2010), though reported wolverine harvest in Canadian territories may be biased due to local use of pelts (COSEWIC 2003). However, pelt exports may or may not represent an accurate index of population abundance, which raises questions about the validity of their conclusions.