ALCES Wildlife Manager

ALCES Wildlife Manager is a customized version of ALCES Integrator that is designed to assist provincial, state and national wildlife (both fish and wildlife) planners and biologists with the development of their strategic plans, to assess the effects of landuse on wildlife habitat and populations, and to devise optimal harvest and management strategies. This spatially stratified simulator is customized for tracking the overlapping landuses and natural disturbance regimes of small to large landscapes (10,000 ha to 100 million ha) that shape the quantity and quality of wildlife habitat and their dependent populations. The major landuses tracked in Wildlife Manager include hunting, fishing, trapping, forestry, energy, mining, residential, industry, agriculture, transportation, and tourism. The major natural disturbance regimes tracked in Wildlife Manager include fire (natural or prescribed), river and lake flow dynamics, meteorology, climate change, insect outbreaks, storm events, avalanches, erosion, and gap dynamics of plant communities.

Other ALCES Products

ALCES Simulators:

ALCES Municipality

ALCES Integrator

Optimizer Plug-In:

ALCES Optimizer is designed to assist with target-based resource management and planning. It helps determine land-use strategies best suited for achieving management objectives. ALCES Optimizer can also be used as an exploratory tool to consider the land-use implications of a range of indicator targets. By directing planning towards promising land-use strategies and realistic management objectives, ALCES Optimizer has the potential to streamline the planning process. (...learn more)

ALCES Mapper:

ALCES Mapper is a companion mapping application for the ALCES model. As an ArcGIS® extension, ALCES Mapper generates maps illustrating the plausible location and extent of future land-use features and landscape types based on ALCES outputs and user-defined parameters. (...learn more)

An important consideration for wildlife managers focuses on the consequences of alternative harvest strategies. These comparisons are facilitated by the following model attributes:

Fish and wildlife populations stratified by gender and age class structure
Fecundity rates are age class specific and can vary with density
Full suite of morphological metrics tracked for all gender x age combination
Harvest, trapping and fishing strategies that are gender and age class specific
Harvest modes individually track sport harvest, First Nations harvest, outfitter harvest, commercial harvest, poaching, and depredation
Immigration and emigration dynamics
Population growth constraints based on social density or forage availability
Other mortality modes include natural mortality, disease-related mortality, and wounding
Natural mortality can be either additive or compensatory to anthropogenic mortality
Mortality either density-dependent or density-independent
Populations subjected to either of deterministic or random natural disturbance regimes
Habitat modelling based on resource selection functions, habitat suitability models, and general linear models
Guild modeling
Multi-species community modeling where user can identify multiple characteristics of predator-prey systems
Population control measures that include depredation, cull, poisoning
Minimum viable population dynamics
Economic (revenues, employment) valuation of various harvest strategies (sport, commercial, outfitter)

ALCES Wildlife Manager also includes the ability to record historical harvest information (harvest type, number, gender, biometrics) for each species. By using this feature, the manager can better understand how changes in landscape composition and human population influence harvest metrics.

ALCES Wildlife Manager runs fast (generally 50 seconds for a 100 year simulation) and reports out on a full complement of economic, ecological, and social indicators relating to fish and wildlife populations and the land uses that affect them. To be most efficiently deployed, licensees of Wildlife Manager are encouraged to bring together disciplinarians of each of the relevant landuses and natural disturbance regimes to populate the model. Our experience at ALCES indicates that Wildlife Manager attributed for a management region can be populated and report out on indicators within 1-months.

Wildlife Manager is accompanied by the ALCES Data Input Sheet (Microsoft Excel) to expedite the entry of major assumptions for initial population structure, reproductive and mortality assumptions, and landuse and natural disturbance regimes.

If desired by the client, simulation data can be readily exported from Wildlife Manager and imported into ALCES Mapper for the spatially explicit mapping of ecological, landscape, and economic indicators for each scenario. Mapping themes include species distribution and density, and wildlife harvest (number, biomass, revenue). Read more about ALCES Mapper here .

Purchase

ALCES Wildlife Manager is available for purchase from the ALCES Group for $15,000 on a license basis described in writing in a license agreement. Licensees may use their original license for as long as they wish, but optional simulator updates are available on an annual basis for a cost of $5,000. All updates available within a year of the original Wildlife Manager purchase are free.

What does a Site License of Wildlife Manager Provide?

A site license to Wildlife Manager provides a single seat for the client. For companies who possess multiple offices in different cities, a separate site license is required for each. It is acceptable to have Wildlife Manager running on multiple machines within a single geographic office. Each license allows the user to simulate and save multiple landscape study areas.

To run Wildlife Manager, the user must obtain a licensed copy of Stella (Research Version 9.13 or later) .

Please contact us for licensing inquiries.

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