Elk response to disturbance from development of a coal bed natural gas field in northeastern Wyoming

Expanding development of resources to meet growing world energy demands will inevitably increase impacts on wildlife populations. Building a greater body of knowledge on the impacts of energy resource development is thus critical for future development planning and wildlife population conservation. The elk herd (Wyoming Herd Unit 320) inhabiting the Fortification Creek Area (FCA) in northeastern Wyoming provided an ideal opportunity to isolate and study the impacts of disturbance from energy development on a wildlife population. The objectives of Chapter 2 was to identify elk resource selection and impacts of CBNG development on elk. One of the major findings of Chapter 2 was documentation of shifts in elk resource use where elk avoided areas of development, thereby reducing high use habitat by 43--50%. This chapter was published in Rangeland Ecology and Management (67:369--379), with co-authors Jeffrey L. Beck, Thomas E. Bills, and Scott N. Miller. The primary objective of Chapter 3 was to assess the ability of elk to mitigate disturbance impacts through spatial and temporal behavioral changes by applying a novel combination of a frequency of use sampling scheme with a mixed-effects statistical framework. One of the major findings of Chapter 3 was movement of elk into areas closer to disturbance at night to access resources when human activity was reduced. Co-authors on this manuscript include Jeffrey L. Beck, Shaun S. Wulff, and Shannon E. Albeke. The objective for Chapter 4 was to further assess disturbance impacts on the FCA elk herd by assessing population dynamics. Limitations in available demographic data drove the use of an innovative alternative analysis using a Bayesian framework. We successfully applied MCMC techniques to sample posterior distributions of simulated elk demographic traits. This application demonstrated the applicability of Bayesian-based statistics as an analysis solution when others are inappropriate. The results of this chapter also highlight the influence of harvest on an elk population. We intend to submit this chapter for publication consideration in Wildlife Biology.