RFMA 2422

Destiny Golosky is the trapper on Trapline 2422. Her father Richard Golosky previously held the line and Destiny was the junior. Destiny’s trapline was burned significantly during the 2016 wildlife. Forestry activity to salvage trees in the years following the wildfire created more disturbance on the trapline. Proposed in situ oil sands projects are also located within and adjacent to the trapline.

Trapline 2422 had a moderate amount of human footprint relative to the three traplines in the study. Of the 5.5% human footprint covering the area of this trapline, forestry features made up the majority of the footprint cover.

Trapline 2422 is mainly made up of forested land cover, primarily:

• Black Spruce (28.5% of the area)

• Treed Fen (26.4%),

• Deciduous Forest (17.6%), and

• Pine Forest (5.5%). 

Swamp features also make up a significant portion of the area (5.1%).

This table shows the habitats that cameras were placed in on Trapline 2422. There is considerable variation, which likely allowed a wide variety of animals to be captured. For example, Camera 2 was placed in 100% Treed Fen, whereas Camera 20 was placed in 100% forestry footprint.

Trapline 2422 captured 9,581 images from 25 cameras, and these images were made up of 11 species.

• White-tailed deer were the most common species captured on this trapline, with 7,125 images, the most of the three traplines by a large margin; the next most deer-heavy trapline had 3,933 images, while the third had only 22.
• Moose and Black Bears were the next most numerous animals tagged in this trapline.

We can use the camera images to estimate the abundance of animals in a trapline, referred to as density. This is done by using the length of time the camera is in the field, the total time over which each species is present in the camera field of view, and the size of area that each camera is capturing. More details about estimated density of each species over the whole project and by trapline can be found in Section 3.1.

The density estimates on this trapline have relatively tight error bars, allowing us to make some inferences. For example, we can see that White-tailed Deer were more abundant than any other species, at about 2 individuals per km², with Moose and Black Bears being the next most abundant at about 0.5 individuals per km².

The spatial analysis results in this project showed us that White-tailed Deer were more common in disturbed areas, so the 5.5% human footprint and 43.6% percent burned areas in this trapline may have contributed to the larger number of deer.

Images with both “Human” and “Vehicle” tags were added to show human activity in this trapline. This trapline had the lowest captured human activity throughout this project of the three traplines used, with 7 images of humans or vehicles in spring 2019.