Yesterday, we enjoyed the opportunity to present three talks during the special session on the ‘Ecology and Management of multispecies ungulate communities’ at the IUGB conference in Montpellier. We appreciated the chance to highlight first results of our research on Swedish ungulates, including diet compositions inferred from DNA metabarcoding and the linkages between environmental variables, population dynamics and browsing impacts.  The session stimulated lively debate among the participating researchers, fostered new ideas, and will likely result in an extension of our current research collaborations.

On 13th of June, Beyond Moose organized a field excursion at Järnäs peninsula for Västerbotten’s wildlife delegation and moose management groups. We introduced the research program to a mixed public of foresters, hunters, land owners, politicians, and civil servants involved with the management of ungulate populations in Västerbotten. Under a lovely early June sun we discussed issues such as movement of moose and roe deer, monitoring of ungulate populations and their impacts on the landscape, and the links between ungulate diets, their impacts on the forest and competition among species. Here, the group is enjoying fika overlooking the Baltic.

Last week was another exciting week in the field! Even though the weather is not always on our side (like today with a thin layer of snow in Umeå) we were so far rather lucky and are hoping for the best in the coming days!
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In one of our study areas in Southern Sweden, Öster Malma, we could already finish all of our field inventories. Besides counting dung groups of deer to estimate population densities we also measure the size of the single pellets to see if we can detect differences between the species. Especially distinguishing between roe deer and fallow deer in the field is mostly very tricky!
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Further, our study area in Öster Malma contains 10 exclosure sites on clear cuts where we investigate the effects of seasonal browsing. For example several young trees are marked in these exclosures so that we can measure them every spring and autumn for the coming years.
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Now we are hoping for the snow to melt to be able to continue soon with the dung counts in Nordmaling.
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Lucky Friday! Today we captured our first roe deer, a young doe who might now just be the most northerly roe deer with a GPS collar in Europe. Unfortunately she did not pose for any pictures after the release.

Photo: F. Stenbacka

A new 30 or 60 credits MSc position entitled
Linking plant diversity to ungulate (klövdjur) diets or ecosystem productivity
is now available in Beyond Moose. We are looking for a candidate with good knowledge of the Swedish forest vegetation, including shrubs, forbs and graminoids in the understory. The full project description can be found here.

Yesterday Beyond Moose organized a meeting at SLU Umeå to discuss how national databases can be linked together and analyzed. Representatives were present from the County Administrative Board, the Swedish Association for Hunting and Wildlife Management, the Swedish Forest Agency, SLU (Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences), the Swedish National Forest Inventory, and the Swedish Police. The aim of the meeting was to get together and discuss how available databases can be used to answer questions on a national scale regarding ungulate distributions in the landscape, food availability, damage from browsing and grazing as well as interactions. All participants showed a keen interest and the possibilities of collaboration are very promising.
Thanks to all participants for their help and input!

This comic, made by Tomasz Samojlik of our collaborating institute Mammal Research Institute (Bialowieza, Poland), highlights our recent Proc Roy Soc B paper about effects of large carnivores in human-dominated landscapes. In this paper, we suggest that in such landscapes some of the effects of large carnivores may be weakened through human action. See:

http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/283/1841/20161625.abstract

Projekten, Beyond Moose och Governance, stod som värdar för en av de tre Viltförvaltardagarna (15/11) som är en årligt återkommande konferens som anordnas av Naturvårdsverket i samarbete med länsstyrelserna. Årets tema var flerartsförvaltning och dagen syftade till att tydligare koppla forskningen till konferensen. Förutom att presentera projekten, få feed-back på innehåll och frågeställningar, samlades även nya data in bland de cirka 80 deltagarna.  
- Det var en givande dag med många insiktsfulla inspel som vi tar med oss i den fortsatta forskningsprocessen, sade Joris Cromsigt, projektledare för Beyond Moose. I stort sett bekräftade deltagarna att vi är inne på rätt spår och att våra studier av interaktioner mellan olika klövvilt, men även inventering och övervakning, behövs i den nya klövviltförvaltningen.
Förutom presentationer av forskningsprojektens olika delar fick konferensdeltagarna möjlighet att direkt reagera och kommentera forskningsfrågor och preliminära resultat.
- För vår del var det väldigt värdefullt att få ta del av allas reflektioner över våra tentativa resultat, menade Sabrina Dressel, doktorand i projektet Governance. Det bidrog till att validera resultat från den attitydundersökning som skickades till alla älgförvaltningsgrupper under våren 2016, men det bidrog även till att identifiera vilka frågor som är viktiga för förvaltningen.
Åter på respektive universitet fortsätter insamlingen och analysen av data. Men redan i nästa vecka är det återigen dags för de båda projekten att möta fler som kan ha nytta av forskningsresultaten. Den här gången är det jägare och markägare i Nordmaling som får möjlighet att ta del av de båda projekten.