GMAC 2.21.23 final draft minutes

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down and thought about it and talked and discussed with folks what data we were missing and what data would be important to better manage them across our diverse landscapes and so here’s a fairly simple representation of what a Hawaiian Island might look like we have our conservation areas, we have our Ag and ranchlands, we have our different hunting units and we know where these different areas are. What we don’t know on this map, um, with reasonable certainty is where these ungulates are across that landscape and what we also don’t know is how they move throughout the time and so at one point in time that previous depiction I just showed you guys, maybe that hunting was pretty productive – there were a lot of animals in there – a hunter could go in and reasonably harvest an animal whereas in this point in time maybe it’s an unproductive hunting unit and there isn’t that access to that resource and on the flip side now maybe we have pressure in our Ag lands in Conservation Areas from those ungulates and so our management decisions are going to be very different at these different points in times and these very different spatial representations depending on where these animals are. So we’ve done - since 2016 - really is kind of conducting these Island-wide comprehensive survey efforts where we go out and we survey all these different locations. Here, I’m showing Oahu, Maui, Hawaii, and we’re currently on Hawaii Island right now but basically each one of these survey locations, depicted in gray here – if you can see those, we do two kinds of survey methods. The first survey method we put out game cameras – we put out six in each of those survey locations, and we leave those cameras out for two weeks – they’re spaced at 50 meters apart and kind of this grid array and then if at the end of two weeks we pull those cameras in and look at what animals we picked up on them. At each of those camera locations we also do sign surveys – so we roll out some tape and each of those grids we look for any signs of animal presence whether that’s digging for pigs, scatter droppings, vegetation disturbance – such as browsing – or any of the kind game trail. We do those surveys when we put out the cameras and when we pick ‘em up so we have two kind of data points there and then using that data so we’ve got our camera detections, we’ve got our sign survey detections, we can then kind of put them in this model which is roughly called the species distribution model and essentially we put in these data inputs and we look at how they correlate with environmental variables so we pull in environmental variable like rainfall, vegetation height, vegetation density, all of those kind of environmental features that might be important to that species biology and then we can look at how they correlate with the detections that we have and then we can predict out the distribution of those animals and so I won’t go super in to depth in this – I’ll leave it at that but if anyone has any questions after I finish the presentation feel free to ask me about our methods or how we develop these things but, um, basically the outputs look like this, and so here’s a distribution model of feral pigs on Maui, just to orient you with these maps I’ve got a few coming up in the coming slides, the yellow colors are gonna be the lower abundance of the animals, the deeper red colors are gonna be the higher abundance of the animals, and then the tables on the left are the different environmental variables that went into predicting the distribution so in this case pigs on Maui, you know, annual rainfall is an important predictor, vegetation height, vegetation density. We actually found that distance to the nearest like \[unclear\] or for wet forest was an important predictor in the distribution of pigs there. We’re also have a model of the distribution of Axis deer and so if you’re familiar with the distribution of Axis deer or with Axis deer on Maui this might look pretty familiar, you know, throughout the Saddle mildly abundant in some of the upcountry kind of ranching areas also widely abundant. What I found interesting when we’d done this work back in 2018 they hadn’t really seen Axis deer over on West Maui near Lahaina and then I presented these maps again to – at a conference thing a few months back – I’m sure enough people raised their hands and said that they were seeing deer in Lahaina now – so it kind of – the maps that we produced from the data 15