National Park Service Grant: Understanding Mesocarnivore Responses to Wolf Reintroduction on Isle Royale

This announcement is to provide public notice of the NPS’s intentions to award financial assistance for the following project activities without competition.  This is a Great Lakes – Northern Forest Cooperative Ecosystem Studies Unit cooperative agreement with the University of Wisconsin, Madison with principal investigator Pauli Lab. The overall goal of this project is to quantify effects and evaluate the impacts of wolf reintroduction on the other native carnivores, fox and marten, within the park. By combining genetic and non-invasive approaches in the field and molecular markers in the laboratory, we will be able to collect sufficient samples to answer fundamental questions of marten and fox ecology and their response to repatriating wolves to Isle Royale. Specific objectives include: 1) Analyze multi-locus genetic data that has already been collected over two field seasons from marten and fox scat samples to estimate abundance, recruitment, and survivorship of foxes and martens via genetic mark-recapture analyses. 2) Quantify diet of martens and foxes from previously collected hair samples for the analysis of stable isotopes to determine marten and fox proportional dietary inputs before and after wolf repatriation and pack coalescence. Analyze camera trap data to explore carrion use and foraging behavior of mesocarnviores. 3) Use documented presences of martens and foxes to develop multi-species and -season occupancy models to explore site-specific occupancy, local extinction and colonization and develop structural equation models to estimate the effect of wolf repatriation on the two other dominant carnivores of the island. 4) Collect a third year of data – scat samples (for genetics) and occupancy models to effectively analyze these data in a robust design framework (3 years of sampling needed to fulfill the robust design framework identified in objectives 1 & 4).