Last updated: November 29, 2024
Article
Snapshots: A Third Chapter in Monitoring Olympic’s Elk?
AUGUST 2024
"So, how many elk are there in the park, anyway?"
It’s a common question at Olympic National Park visitor centers, but surprisingly hard to answer.
Wildlife managers seek to track the size and characteristics of elk herds over time, watching for changes that might be red flags for the status and health of Olympic’s iconic Roosevelt elk.
Although elk are protected from hunting inside park boundaries, the emergence of wildlife diseases like treponeme-associated hoof disease and chronic wasting disease in Washington State has biologists on alert. And elk don’t stop at the entrance gate—some herds move in and out of the park seasonally, meaning National Park Service scientists need data to collaborate with outside agencies to maintain sustainable elk populations.
Left: NPS / Em Wymore | Right: NPS / Hazel Galloway
Left: NPS / Hazel Galloway | Right: NPS / Dan Johnson
From 1984 through 2010, NPS and US Geological Survey biologists partnered to conduct helicopter surveys of winter elk ranges on the Hoh, South Fork Hoh, and Queets floodplains. While logistical hurdles and issues with survey design eventually halted those flights, data pointed to declines in all three watersheds over the 27-year window.
Starting in 2008, a new monitoring program including both Olympic and Mount Rainier National Park shifted the focus to subalpine meadows, which are used by elk during the summer months. Only eight years later, park biologists placed it, too, on hold. A shift in the time of year elk use open subalpine meadows—which scientists believe is linked to climate change—alongside rises in the complexity and cost of aerial surveys led to a suspension of surveys after 2015.
Now, Olympic is experimenting with a new way to monitor the park’s iconic elk herds: game cameras.
Starting in 2019, wildlife crews deployed 30 cameras in remote locations in the Quinault and later the Hoh drainages on the west side of the park. Alone in the forest they stood sentry, collecting snapshots at set intervals to serve as raw data for a pilot study.
Left: NPS / Dan Johnson | Right: NPS / Hazel Galloway
Because cameras are stationary while elk move through the park, this approach will yield different information than the aerial surveys did. “We probably wouldn’t get a total count,” said Olympic wildlife biologist Miranda Terwilliger, “but we could get occupancy—are elk using this area, or are they not? The question is, can we also get things like cow-calf ratio and sex ratio? And if we can get occupancy, can we tell if the population is increasing or declining?”
This summer, Olympic wildlife staff backpacked and bushwhacked, following coordinates in GPS units and hand-written field notes, to safely retrieve the last of these cameras from their vigils in the Hoh watershed.
One drawback of camera-based monitoring is the vast quantities of data produced. While scientists are hopeful that machine learning can be used to help analyze the imagery, much is still uncertain. For the time being, images from the pilot study are on their way to being sorted and transformed into usable data. Only then will analysis show if the cameras can be used to deliver new answers to old questions.
Regaining a view of elk status and trends is a priority for scientists with Olympic and the North Coast & Cascades Inventory and Monitoring Network. The health of elk herds is an important indicator of—and contributor to—the health of the park as a whole.
“They’re big ecosystem drivers,” said Terwilliger. “They’re prey to a lot of predators; they drive a lot of vegetation changes therefore they have cascading impacts on smaller mammals and things like that. And clearly they are changing how they use the habitat based on climate change, which maybe has some much more significant implications for parks in the future.”