Greetings Everyone,

The following is a comprehensive (e-mail) response from Denali National Park wolf biologist Tom Meier in regards to the roadside study questions and concerns that I posted earlier. 

I know many of us have had concerns regarding this study and I think this helps to address and possibly alleviate many of the concerns.

Also, I would like to thank Tom for taking the time to answer these questions in such an open and comprehensive manner.

All the best.

Bill

From Tom Meier,

The purposes of the road traffic study are to evaluate the impacts of road
traffic not only on wildlife, but on the quality of the visitor experience
and on other aspects of the road environment, like noise and dust.  The
study isn't funded by the tourist industry.  Rather, it's funded by NPS
funds generated by the franchise fees that ARAMARK and others pay to do business in the park.  Part of the study will also be funded by fee demo
money, obtained from visitor entrance fees.  These are all NPS funds,
generated locally rather than coming from Washington.

Any experimental increase in traffic would come only in 2009 or later, and
only after an Environmental Impact Statement has been completed,
incorporating the results of the wildlife and traffic studies and
concluding that the road isn't already at or above capacity.

I personally think that the wildlife work will be the least conclusive part
of the road study package, but we can't ignore it because it's what the
road is all about.  But sorting out the effects of road and foot traffic,
habituation, daily and seasonal behavior patterns, and individual variation
between animals will be very difficult.  On the positive side, we have Dr.
Rick Mace, the person most experienced at analyzing the effects of roads on grizzly bears in the Rocky Mountains, lined up to help us analyze the
animal movement data.

We plan to examine and incorporate the results of all of the many studies
of traffic/wildlife impacts that have been done in the park.  The unique
contribution of the proposed work is that it will be the first study that
hasn't been road-based, so that it will allow us to compare the movements
of wildlife when they're near the road with movements when they're away
from the road.  The collars we're preparing to put on 20 bears and 20 sheep will fall off in September, having been on the animals for 4 to 6 months.

They will gather data for the 4 months of road use.  Battery limitations
mean that we can get only one location per hour from such collars.  So we
have no intention of looking at events, such as the reaction of an
individual sheep to a bus.  Rather, this data density will allow us to look
at differences in sheep and bear movements between night and day, between different times of the season, and between different geographic areas.  We also hope that we might make inferences about how the movements of bears affect other bears, but that might be beyond the reach of this study.  For all of this, we're relying on the expertise of Dr. Mace, who is doing similar work in Montana.

For the visitor experience part of the study, we're contracting with Dr.
Robert Manning of the University of Vermont.  Dr Manning heads up the Park Studies Lab (http://www.uvm.edu/envnr/parkstudies/), which specializes in analyzing visitor experience, overcrowding, and capacity issues in national parks.  Dr. Manning wants to arrange a meeting next spring, to design the visitor surveys that he and his grad students will begin next summer.  He specifically requested the input of bus drivers and others with long-term experience on the park road.

In order to start getting input from drivers and others on the road study,
I'd like to arrange a meeting in December or January, to set up an advisory
committee to help with the study.  I'd appreciate any suggestions or help
in setting up the meeting and contacting people who might be interested in
attending.

For the traffic analysis part of the study, we hope to put GPS devices on
all buses and large maintenance vehicles, and on a sample of administrative
and personal vehicles on the road.  The devices collect and store locations
as often as every minute or less, and upload the data via a radio signal
when the vehicle returns to its home base.  This data will be used by the
University of Minnesota Intelligent Transportation Systems Laboratory
(http://www.its.umn.edu/labs/itslab.html), in order to build a model of
park road traffic.  This project is a novel one for these people, who
usually work with urban traffic flow, but they have become very
enthusiastic about it, and have designed a data logger that we hope to
install on a sample of buses, so that drivers can record wildlife
observations and the reasons for other stops along the road.  In order to
plan the use of these loggers by 10 or 20 drivers, and in order to develop
appropriate traffic rules for their model, the University of Minnesota
engineers also need to interact with drivers and other road users.  Helping
them with their work will be another main function of the advisory
committee that we hope to form.

I have no doubt that this study will be seen as a boondoggle by those who
see it as an excuse to prevent more people from enjoying the park, and by
those who see it as an excuse to dump excessive numbers of visitors into
the park.  I can't think of a fairer process to answer those concerns than
to conduct a set of well-thought-out scientific studies conducted by the
most experienced scientists in their fields.  As Philip Hooge has pointed
out, the easiest thing for us to do would be to do nothing, and have a
solution thrust on us by Congress.

Following are some brief responses to your questions:

How many bears and sheep are to be radio collared next year?

--  20 of each.

In what areas along the park road are they to be collared?

--  The bears will likely be distributed along the road, the sheep
concentrated on one area, possibly Polychrome/Toklat.

What is the expected mortality of both bears and sheep due to tranquilizing
them?

--  Bears zero, sheep one.

If the collaring process is to take place next spring after the bears have
lost upwards of
30% of their body weight, wouldn't the added stress of tranquilizing them
make mortality more likely? If so, what will NPS due to alleviate this
possibility?

-- Spring has traditionally been the time when bears have been
radio-collared in Denali, and success has been very high.  Bear capture
will be carried out by Pat Owen and Rick Mace, both of whom have extensive
experience with bear capture.

Will NPS be tranquilizing mostly the sub-adults, or female bears or both?

-- We'll be trying for a mixture of ages and sexes.

Will female bears with cubs be tranquilized?

-- Yes.

Without knowing what the Denali grizzly bear population dynamics are along
the road: the impacts of an accidental death to a breeding female are
unknown (but obviously not good) to the population but for roadside
viewing, they can be tremendous. Does NPS have any intention of attempting
to determine the population dynamics of this roadside population before
they begin their roadside study through non-collaring methods?

--  No, because we hope to begin this study right away this spring.  But
there is a significant history of bear monitoring in Denali that provides a
good background.

What procedures will be in place to reverse negative side effects of
tranquilizers?

-- The usual methods that have been used with great success  here and
elsewhere, including the use of drug mixtures to minimize agitation and
other side effects, taking precautions in where animals are left to recover
from drugs, the use of highly experienced crews and pilots in capture
operations, and leaving the animal alone to recover in a quiet environment.
Sheep would be net-gunned, not drugged.  Sheep capture will be handled by
Jim Lawler and John Burch of NPS in Fairbanks, who are very experienced at
this.

Will a vet be on board to monitor the condition of the bears and sheep
while they are being tranquilized?

-- No.  Having experienced biologists who have handled hundreds of animals
has proven to be the best tactic for efficient, brief handling of animals.
None of the capture-related mortalities that I'm aware of could have been
prevented by a vet on site.

What will NPS do with orphaned cubs (spring & 1 1/2 yr olds) if a female
bear is accidentally killed due to tranquilizing?

--  This hasn't happened here, and I'm not sure what the policy would be.
I would suspect that younger cubs would be taken into captivity and older
ones left alone, but that is only a guess.  It's an extremely unlikely
scenario.

Is NPS prepared for the public uproar if a Denali bear family that is
commonly viewed is negatively impacted by the above?

--  I'm not sure how you prepare for a public uproar, but this seems like
an unlikely thing.  We are certainly prepared to accept the consequences of
what we do.

Will NPS attempt to use color-coded radio collars (if they exist) to lessen
the negative and visual pollution that collars have on the general viewing
public?

-- Yes.  Sheep collars would be white, bear collars brown.  We would also
implement an educational effort, to explain that these collars were on the
animals for just a few months, that they will automatically fall off, and
to explain the purpose of the study.

Why isn't NPS using data collected in the past by not only NPS personnel
(Karen & Shan's roadside study) but also data accumulated by bus drivers
over the years to establish a base line from which to move from?

-- All of this data will be looked at in the design of the road study and
the preparation of the EIS.  Unfortunately there have been many such
studies, with sometimes inconclusive or conflicting results.  The easy
answer would be to use those past studies to justify what we do, without
attempting to fill in the gaps in what we know.

What studies and/or reasons does NPS have to justify the exclusion of the
previous roadside data and NPS studies?

--  We have no reason to exclude any of those data.

Will the large number of day hikers and backpackers from the Toklat River
to the Eielson area also be included within the study to determine their
impacts on the movements of bears and sheep? If not, why not? As this is
critical habitat, especially for bears.

--  The best way to evaluate pedestrian traffic is probably to assume that
increased road traffic will lead to increased pedestrian traffic.  The
purpose of the study is to evaluate the impacts of road traffic, however
those effects are manifested.

Buses, bears and sheep will have GPS tracking units, yet how will NPS make
the determination that a bus caused a change in a bear or sheep's behavior
versus a natural cause without actually viewing the interaction?

--  As I mentioned above, we can't hope to look at particular events (bear
meets bus) with the 1-hour resolution of animal locations that we'll get.
We only hope to see the larger patterns of animal movement and reaction to the road.  But we do hope to have people out on the road to ground-truth the results and to provide the kind of anecdotal evidence that can help
explain them.

Also, NPS is planning to vary the numbers of buses onto the road on certain days to determine the impacts of additional buses. Some days there will be a heavier concentration of buses than others. This past summer, Tour would almost routinely send out over 20 buses in the morning, along with VTS, and the Kantishna buses, this inundates the park with road traffic. Kennan Ward (professional photographer) reported to me that on one morning as he was exiting the park, he counted 55 buses. How many more buses does NPS plan to send out over and above what is already traveling into the park? Also, does NPS intend to study the impacts of this plan on the park experience for visitors?

--  No change in the existing road traffic quotas can be made without
appropriate environmental compliance, which is the purpose of this study
and the subsequent EIS.  So any experimental increase is years down the
road.  It would be nice to be able to declare bus holidays or otherwise
manipulate traffic, but we don't expect to be able to do that, because of
the schedules of the majority of park visitors who are on tours, and
because it would be an arbitrary curtailment of opportunities for some
visitors and not for others.  The overarching purpose of the study is to
preserve the quality of the visitor experience.  This might sound overly
visitor-oriented, but I would argue that preserving the quality of that
experience necessarily involves preserving the integrity of the environment
and the wildlife populations.

I believe adding more buses will only degrade the visitor experience as
this creates more traffic, dust, and wildlife jams. Additionally, it
especially impacts those visitors who recreate on or near the park road. If
NPS goes through with this plan, they should also survey visitors as to
their experience.

--  That's why we're relying on Dr. Manning, who has made a career of
studying the quality of experience of national park visitors, to provide
those answers.  I really believe that the visitor experience and logistic
constraints will be the keys to the appropriate limits to road traffic,
rather than any wildlife impacts that we can measure.

Lastly, the Tourism industry has funded this study, and many bus drivers
have reported to me that they believe that the results of this study have
been pre-determined in favor of the Tourism industry which would result in
ever more increases in bus traffic.

--  As mentioned above, the study is funded entirely by NPS funds, some of which are generated by the franchise fees that commercial operators pay to operate in the park.  We do have the cooperation of the bus company in
installing GPS devices etc.  We will also be dependent on the cooperation
of bus drivers and other road users.  But the involvement of these people
should not mean that the study is biased in one direction or another.  Our
purpose is to provide a scientific basis for decision-making, and an
understandable model of traffic impacts.

I hope that this has helped to explain the perspective of the people who
are involved in this study.  This isn't meant to be the definitive NPS
explanation or response, just my personal observations.  I hope that we can
continue to correspond about this, and that we can convene an advisory
committee of drivers and other road users, to help design and implement the study.

Tom Meier
Wildlife Biologist
Denali National Park and Preserve
P. O. Box  9
Denali Park, AK 99755