Bison and bighorns : assessing the potential impacts of reintroducing a large herbivore to a mountainous landscape ...

• Main Author: White, Peter James
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: University of British Columbia 2022
• Subjects: Bison bison bison; Plains Bison
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.14288/1.0421633; https://doi.library.ubc.ca/10.14288/1.0421633

Wildlife reintroductions can reshape energetic flows in food webs. After a 150-year absence, plains bison (Bison bison bison) were recently reintroduced to Banff National Park (BNP) to restore the impact of this threatened keystone species. Given their large size and energetic demands, BNP managers anticipated bison to cause reverberating effects on food webs. My research provides a rare opportunity to explore the impacts of this reintroduction on another large herbivore, the Rocky Mountain bighorn sheep (Ovis Canadensis). Understanding the potential for interactions between bison and other sympatric ungulates remains an important factor to determine the future of bison management in BNP. Using GPS collars from 39 sheep and 11 bison, collared between 2018 and 2021, I investigated their resource and spatial use to determine overlap and evaluate three hypotheses: competition, facilitation, and complementarity. Using the competition hypothesis, I predicted sheep would overlap with bison in resource use, but ...