As a new resource in 2013, the ONB will include articles from Cooperative Research Units across the country. These units are leading exciting, new wildlife research projects that we believe our readers will appreciate reading about. This month's article was submitted by Dr. Joe Margraf, Supervisor of Cooperative Research Units with the U. S. Geological Survey.

Traditional management of wildlife takes place on relatively fine spatial and temporal scales, often for good reasons: some population dynamics as well as allocation of harvest opportunity take place on these scales. Nonetheless, understanding broad-scale population dynamics is also critical, including how those dynamics respond to changes in management, habitat, predation, and climate across the range of a species. This is the case for elk, which are found throughout the northwestern United States and are of strong interest to the state agencies that manage them. Although elk have been widely studied and monitored across the many western states where they exist, elk managers and researchers would benefit from a better understanding of range-wide population dynamics and the mechanisms driving them. A new collaborative effort is working to combine the data resulting from these many efforts to offer a unique and unprecedented opportunity to better understand and manage one of the iconic species of the western United States.

The Western Elk Research Collaborative is a group of state biologists, researchers, cooperative research unit scientists, and university faculty that are pooling Rocky Mountain elk data from Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Oregon, Utah, Washington, Wyoming, and Yellowstone National Park. The group has developed a set of shared objectives, data-sharing agreements, and decision-making protocols. WERC collaborators are contributing data from their respective states in order to conduct large-scale, multi-region analyses of the factors affecting population dynamics of the populations they manage. The research results generated will provide a broad context for making management decisions by state and federal agencies charged with conserving elk herds. The collaborators meet regularly in workshops to discuss results of analyses and to determine potential directions for future work. In addition, the group prepares reports outlining the results of the collaborative effort, as well as multi-authored articles for publication in peer-reviewed journals.

Elk population dynamics are driven by factors affecting survival and recruitment. WERC research aims to understand these factors at broad spatial and temporal scales. Researchers have already examined survival of adult female elk in relation to environmental factors, hunting, and predation. Studies found that human harvest, and its apparent use by managers to offset predation, primarily controls variation in adult female mortality, and that mortality from wolves in years with high winter precipitation could affect elk abundance as winters across the western US become drier. Current research seeks to understand how reproductive output varies across space and time as a function of environmental factors such as weather and plant productivity, as well as predation. The collaborative will then combine all the information about elk population dynamics into a Bayesian Integrated Population Model to better understand how survival and reproduction interact and to better predict future elk population size to aid management decisions. Further, the temporal component of these analyses could provide insight on the effects of climate change on elk population dynamics.

WERC is currently gathering reproduction data from the collaborating states. These data represent large spatial (7 western states) and temporal (up to 25 years for some elk herds) scales. Elk reproductive data of this magnitude have never been synthesized before, therefore the potential strength of the data set is exciting. In addition, the group is gathering spatial information on plant productivity and weather variables across the entire region where data have been collected. The integrated population modeling process will begin after the recruitment analysis is complete.

The population and harvest modeling that are being conducted will ultimately inform how elk are understood and managed across a variety of spatial and temporal scales, throughout much of their range. The group's work will contribute to unique decision support tools that managers can use to explore how management, habitat conditions, predation, and climate influence harvestable numbers of elk. Elk researchers and population ecologists will benefit from the novel insights that will result from one of the broadest, long-term, and comprehensive analyses ever attempted for a large mammal. None of these advances would be possible without close collaboration and communication among multiple state and federal agencies, universities, and cooperative research units, which has been one of the signature successes of WERC. Working together, the group will provide unprecedented contributions to both elk management and scientific understanding.