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| Bio: Brian Knudsen |
Consulting Services
Enhancing Your Project Team
The consulting services of Knudsen Wildlife Management Systems are primarily oriented toward providing tightly focused expertise at specific points in the life cycle of a project, such as while:
- reviewing literature
- preparing proposals
- designing data collection
- training staff
- analyzing data
- creating projections
Longer committments will be undertaken as permitted by the schedules of major projects. To learn more about available services, recent projects, or Brian Knudsen, please click on the topics at left.
There are many contexts in which information is best disseminated by bringing an appropriate group
together in a workshop setting. Participants can be the field staff of a project, stakeholders in a management plan, or individuals needing a starter or refresher
course in a specialized skill area.
we learned that there were indeed wild boars west of Ste-Perpetue, and that they were being hunted ("Sangliers!!! Barbeque!!!") . This type of information is important to record, because it often stays under the radar of sample-based monitoring. In areas where feral pigs have become a problem, it has been common to discover that local residents had been aware of pigs for years, but never thought they were a problem. Then they found that, quite suddenly, there were pigs everywhere, rooting and feeding, and it had become impossible to get rid of them. If warmer winters persist, feral pigs will only move further north in North America, and become more of a problem.
In the summer of 2010, Rosemary Dzus and I also visited several locations in Quebec, Labrador and the island of Newfoundland, where woodland caribou herds occur. This was a valuable opportunity to get a feel for the variation in environments that woodland caribou occupy, from the Avalon Peninsula to the Northern Peninsula to the Mealy Mountains and the Red Wine area. The access provided by the Trans-Labrador Highway, which only opened in 2010, gave us the chance to do this, but will also bring a massive increase in disturbance to the Mealy Mountain area. That is unlikely to bode well for the local herd.
In the summer of 2009, I worked with colleagues at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, setting up a framework for recording observations of feral pig penetration into the agricultural land of the Southern Plains area around Lubbock. Until recently, feral pigs had not moved west from the rugged land below the rock escarpment called the Caprock (photo at right), into the extensive irrigated agricultural areas of the Llano Estacado. Knudsen Wildlife Management Systems created a system of recording information on a three minute grid, in ESRI ArcGIS, whereby reports of feral pig presence and activity could be summarized in a way that would allow eradication efforts to be implemented in a strategic way, gradually pushing feral pig populations back to the edge of the Caprock.
In May, 2009, Rosemary Dzus and I travelled to several locations in Saskatchewan at which feral pigs had been reported, to gather data on local persistence or disappearance. We learned that in the valley of the South Saskatchewan River, just north of Sceptre, wild boars were persisting. Sows were using islands in the river as sites for having their litters, and local residents were hunting boars. At Grasslands National Park, just downstream on the Frenchman River from a large captive wild boar herd, there were no reports of any pigs remaining at large. At Moose Mountain Park, pigs were apparently seen only rarely outside of the park itself, and eradication methods were being structured as organized, focused teams working from the air and on the ground. This is the method which seems to have worked well in western North Dakota in 2008.
In the summers of 1967 and 1968 I began working on polar bears, as a field assistant to Dr. Charles Jonkel of the Canadian Wildlife Service. The project conducted trapping and tagging operations on Southampton Island, Coats Island, North Twin Island, Cape Henrietta Maria, La Perouse Bay, Cape Tatnam and Cape Churchill. In 1969 I began my graduate research studying the behavioural ecology of polar bears on North Twin Island in James Bay, an uninhabited island of approximately 150 sq km, which held as many as 50 polar bears during the summer months. I captured and tagged polar bears, and observed the movement patterns of the bears. These data allowed the calculation of time budgets of bears during the ice-free period and the degree of inter-year fidelity to specific islands. I lived on North Twin Island for a total of 13 months from 1969 to 1972, and attended university at the University of Montana, receiving my M.A. in 1973.
From 1972 to 1974, I worked on polar bears as a freelance biologist on various projects,
including trapping problem polar bears at Churchill, capturing polar bears for physiology experiments, searching for maternity dens in the Arctic Islands, observing polar bears from cliffs on Devon Island and tagging polar bears from a helicopter in Ungava Bay.
In 1975 and 1976 I made trips to Home Bay on Baffin Island for the National Museum of Canada, studying the taxonomy and the cliff-nesting adaptations of a group of species of large white-headed gulls in a zone of sympatry. This was also beginning of my Doctoral program at the University of Manitoba under Dr. Roger Evans. From 1977 to 1979 I did field research on Herring Gulls (also on cliff-nesting adaptations and on parent-young communication) at the Bowdoin College research station on Kent Island, in the Bay of Fundy.
During this study, which resulted in my doctoral dissertation: "Reproductive Success amd Behaviour of Herring Gulls Breeding in Adjacent Cliff and Flat Habitats", I discovered patterns of explosive mortality within the gull colony, caused by predation by nesting adults on their neighbours' chicks. This was a rare event, and therefore very difficult to document by observation in the field -
you could never get a large enough sample size. So I was led into building models of the process, and also, eventually into 30 years of building biological models. I was also led into more intensive statistical work, using multivariate techniques to distinguish between the vocalizations of individual Herring Gulls.
This worked out very nicely indeed, because three wonderful new priorities, by the names of Dan, Barry and Jane arrived in my life during these years. It's difficult to be an Arctic biologist and also be involved in soccer, baseball, dancing, judo, etc. But it's easy to do those things If you have a 9 to 5 job as a Biometrician, Which was exactly what the Wildlife Branch of Manitoba Natural Resources offered me in the summer of 1979.
From then until the fall of 2007, I served as Biometrician, Population Ecologist and (for a few years) Chief of Wildlife Management for the Province of Manitoba. My four main roles in the Wildlife Branch were designing aerial surveys of ungulates, writing population models to forecast the consequences of hunting seasons, conducting the annual Big Game Hunter Questionnaire and maintaining a database of all these bodies of information. I also taught courses on quantitative and theoretical ecology and natural resource management at the University of Manitoba.
In addition to the core tasks listed above, I had the opportunity to be involved the the early years of remote sensing of wildlife habitat, working on moose and caribou projects in Northern Manitoba. I conducted workshops on statistics and other quantititive methods for wildlife biologists, and began to investigate the application of fuzzy expert systems in wildlife management.
The years in the Wildlife Branch were a time of neverending delight in the increasing computing
power on my desk. From my first machine, my beloved little Apple II+, which I bought to be able to run very CPU-intensive simulation work for my dissertation, personal computers made me smile every time I sat down at my desk. Well, not absolutely every time. But that's the spirit of the thing. It was a great era to love using computers - pretty much like living in a gingerbread house.
There were some wonderful people who shared my delight in the flow of great new software and hardware.
Thanks to all my friends and teachers in Manitoba, Montana, and up North, who were along for the trip. It was great, you guys.
Since leaving the Branch, I have been making the most of escaping from fluorescent lights and cubicles. I operate Knudsen Wildlife Management Systems out of Warren, located in the southern Interlake of Manitoba. Some of the details of work since 2007 are described in