DURANGO Researchers who work to protect the threatened Canada lynx in the Western United States focused their studies on the San Juan Mountains this past winter.
Cross country skiers and snowmobilers headed into the backcountry along the U.S. Highway 550 corridor from January through March were asked to voluntarily carry a Global Positioning System device to track their activities.
Upon their return, they could drop the device into a lockbox or mail it to the U.S. Forest Service. As a thank you, the forest service provided, electronically, a map of the area visited on which was superimposed in bright purple the itinerary of the visitor.
The routes of the snowmobilers and skiers will be compared with similar information taken from radio-collared lynx to determine where winter recreation areas and the habitat of the reclusive, mobile cat overlap.
The knowledge is important, said Liz Roberts, a Forest Service biologist with the White River National Forest, to determine the extent to which recreation encroaches on lynx country.
The peripatetic lynx needs to be able to move freely from area to area, Roberts said.
Roberts research started with Vail Pass, which is one of the few places that lynx can safely cross beneath Interstate 70 as they navigate between northern Colorado and the San Juan Mountains where they were reintroduced in Colorado starting in 1999.
Until then, lynx hadnt been seen in the state since 1973.
The Colorado Division of Wildlife released 218 lynx fitted with radio collars around Creede from 1999 to 2006. A self-sustaining population of the species has been established, with collared lynx migrating even out of state.
Wildlife officials last summer deemed the project a success. No more releases are scheduled, a division of wildlife spokesman in Durango said this week.
Roberts enlisted the help of the Rocky Mountain Research Station in Missoula, Mont., to determine the extent of the interplay between winter sports enthusiasts and lynx.
The request for help brought John Squires, a research biologist at the Montana facility, into the project.
Squires leads a team that looks for ways to conserve threatened and endangered Rocky Mountain carnivores, mainly lynx and wolverines.
Squires studies diverse issues that require collaboration with individuals and agencies. His broad field of inquiry includes lynx movement across vast terrain, the impact of human activity, including recreation, on lynx and how climate change can affect the species.
Squires has been involved in lynx research for more than a decade in Montana and the northern Rockies.
Radio collars revolutionized our ability to study lynx, Squires said. The old way was to track them with an airplane. Now, the GPS units give their location every 20 minutes.
The electronic units that people carry record their location every two seconds.
By combining the results of tracking lynx and humans, researchers will have a more solid foundation on which to make recommendations, Squires said.
Roberts and Squires monitored human winter recreation via GPS devices around the Vail Pass/I-70 corridor in the winters of 2009-10 and 2010-11.
The first year, we had 40 GPS units that brought back 400 samples, Roberts said. Last year, we had 100 GPS units from which were still collecting data.
The team expanded its research to the Colorado Highway 550 corridor last winter and will return this year if plans work out, Roberts said.
We like to have two years at each site, Roberts said. The next logical step would be to include the Wolf Creek Pass and Telluride areas in the study, Roberts said.
Roberts doesnt have preliminary data from the Highway 550 or Vail Pass research yet. Raw data are stored until all of it is in hand, she said.
Squires said the density of Vail area ski resorts allows researchers to see how lynx respond to recreation in relatively tight quarters.
Conversely, Squires said, the broad expanses of Southwest Colorado provide a chance to study lynx reaction to dispersed human activity in the form of cross country skiers and snowmobilers.
The Forest Service receives support for the lynx project from a number of partners, including the Division of Wildlife, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the Colorado Department of Transportation, Climax Molybdenum Co. and Val Associates, Roberts said.