Big Game Monitoring

Big game populations in each Game Hunting Area are managed on a sustainable basis to provide opportunities for both hunting and viewing within ecologically diverse landscapes in Manitoba.

Understanding population dynamics, especially population change, is essential in optimizing the management of big game populations and requires continual data collection by a variety of methods. The primary data collection methods used by the Wildlife and Ecosystem Protection Branch are:

• winter aerial inventories 
• hunter (mail-out) questionnaires 
• biological specimen collection  
• population simulation 

Determining the extent of population change is best achieved by looking at many parameters collectively rather than one component in isolation.

In addition to monitoring to gather population dynamics data, monitoring occurs to gather data on infection rates of diseases such as bovine tuberculosis and chronic wasting disease.