Wildlife Management With a Capitalistic or a Socialistic Flavor: A Comparison of Montana with Norway

Montana and Norway passed laws in 1897 and 1899, respectively, which set the stage for today’s wildlife management. These laws were part of an effort to conserve dwindling populations of large ungulates. The Montana Legislature decided that the responsibility of wildlife management would rest primarily with the State, whereas the Norwegian Parliament decided that it would rest with the landowner. These efforts to conserve native large ungulates were successful in both Montana and Norway, but the choice of philosophically different ways to accomplish it led to very different management systems. I argue that Montana chose a socialistic system, in the sense that everyone has the same right to hunt and fish. Norway chose a capitalistic system with the landowners owning the hunting and fishing rights. I will argue that this has had major implications for the differences between these two entities in political support for wildlife, hunting methods and ethics, and wildlife conservation in general

Denning behaviour of Scandinavian brown bears Ursus arctos

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Exponentiated Subgradient Algorithm for Online Optimization under the Random Permutation Model

Online optimization problems arise in many resource allocation tasks, where the future demands for each resource and the associated utility functions change over time and are not known apriori, yet resources need to be allocated at every point in time despite the future uncertainty. In this paper, we consider online optimization problems with general concave utilities. We modify and extend an online optimization algorithm proposed by Devanur et al. for linear programming to this general setting. The model we use for the arrival of the utilities and demands is known as the random permutation model, where a fixed collection of utilities and demands are presented to the algorithm in random order. We prove that under this model the algorithm achieves a competitive ratio of $1-O(\epsilon)$ under a near-optimal assumption that the bid to budget ratio is $O (\frac{\epsilon^2}{\log({m}/{\epsilon})})$, where $m$ is the number of resources, while enjoying a significantly lower computational cost than the optimal algorithm proposed by Kesselheim et al. We draw a connection between the proposed algorithm and subgradient methods used in convex optimization. In addition, we present numerical experiments that demonstrate the performance and speed of this algorithm in comparison to existing algorithms

Saving large carnivores, but losing the apex predator?

AbstractLarge terrestrial carnivores, e.g. wolves or bears, often play a key ecological role from their position at the apex of trophic systems. Changes to their populations reverberate through ecological communities; consequently their widespread decline in numbers and shrinking distribution due to human persecution has brought about a loss and reconfiguration of biological diversity in many systems. Although many large carnivore populations are now under conservation-minded management, political and economic constraints make compromises necessary. A common compromise is to permit limited harvests, with the premise of sustainability and the objective to increase tolerance and funding for carnivore recovery and conservation. Here we question whether a large carnivore that has to “look over its shoulder” for human hunters can still fully perform its ecological role at the apex of a trophic system. We use information about carnivore behavior, ecology, trophic interactions, and the effects of human exploitation to argue that exploitation of large carnivores, even if sustainable numerically, undermines the commonly expressed rationale for their conservation, namely the restoration and preservation of ecosystem functionality. Our argument centers around (i) the necessity of behavioral adjustments in large carnivores to anthropomorphic risk, which may limit their contribution to the “landscape of fear”, and (ii) the observation that many of the same features that put large carnivores at the apex of trophic systems also make them vulnerable to human exploitation and persecution, with implicit consequences for their ecological functionality and evolution. Although hunting large carnivores can improve public acceptance, managers must be aware of the trade-offs

Endozoochory by brown bears stimulates germination in bilberry

The understory vegetation of the Eurasian boreal forest is dominated by several ericaceous species (e.g. bilberry Vaccinium myrtillus). These species invest large amounts of energy in their sexual reproduction by producing seed-containing berries, which are apparent adaptations for endozoochory. Their seedlings are, however, almost never found in the wild, and they reproduce virtually exclusively through clones. Brown bears Ursus arctos consume enormous amounts of ericaceous berries (predominantly bilberry in central Scandinavia) during hyperphagia, and may facilitate sexual reproduction in such species. If ericaceous species would benefit from endozoochory by brown bears, one would predict that endozoochory would have no negative impacts on germination. We experimentally evaluated this prediction using germination trials under controlled conditions of bilberry seeds that were 1) extracted from brown bear feces, 2) extracted from ripe berries and 3) contained in berries. Using time-to-event analyses, we showed that passing the gut by itself did not stimulate or limit germination. However, seeds that were released from the berries germinated about one month earlier compared to seeds contained in berries. This implies that being released from a fruit, for example through endozoochory, can have a large temporal germination and growth advantage, especially in northern ecosystems a with short growing season.publishedVersio

DISTRIBUTION OF GRAY WOLVES IN RESPONSE TO HABITAT AND HUMAN PRESENCE IN THE ABSAROKA-BEARTOOTH WILDERNESS, MONTANA

Since wolves (Canis lupus) were reintroduced into Yellowstone National Park (YNP) in 1995 and 1996, the population has increased and expanded into adjacent areas. In this study, we documented the distribution of wolves in relation to habitat and human presence in the Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness (ABW) in Montana during the summers of 2005 and 2006, prior to the onset of wolf hunting in 2009, by observing tracks and scat along USDA Forest Service (USFS) trails. Our results indicated that wolves in the ABW 1)  were primarily located near the boundary of YNP, 2) did not prefer forested habitats when traveling on trails, 3) did not avoid USFS cabins or outfitter camps, and 4) did not differentiate between permanent cabins and temporary camps

Gr\"obner Bases and Nullstellens\"atze for Graph-Coloring Ideals

We revisit a well-known family of polynomial ideals encoding the problem of graph-$k$-colorability. Our paper describes how the inherent combinatorial structure of the ideals implies several interesting algebraic properties. Specifically, we provide lower bounds on the difficulty of computing Gr\"obner bases and Nullstellensatz certificates for the coloring ideals of general graphs. For chordal graphs, however, we explicitly describe a Gr\"obner basis for the coloring ideal, and provide a polynomial-time algorithm.Comment: 16 page

Human injuries and fatalities caused by brown bears in Russia, 1932–2017

publishedVersio