Wildlife Management Case Study

The Bathurst Caribou Herd makes an annual migration to their calving grounds on the tundra near the Bathurst Inlet. Our participation was twofold: to determine if Infrared cameras could assist in locating the Caribou, and to evaluate the role that advanced mapping technology could play in estimating the herd size. ARS not only has digital video recording capabilities, but the video recordings contain frame-accurate information on the position and orientation of the camera which provide post-flight analytical abilities including the ability to compute the exact latitude, longitude, and altitude of every pixel on the screen.  Back at camp, we were able to fast forward, pause, and rewind the video. The location of caribou could be marked by simply clicking on the animal in the video, and the results exported to a shapefile.

While the Bathurst Caribous herd saw a precipitous decline in numbers which prevented us from achieving all of our objectives, we learned a great deal from this experience and are confident that ARS could prove to be a valuable tool in assisting naturalists with population counts.

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