Goose Terrestrial Assessment - Wapsuk National Park

Wapusk National Park protects a vast landscape of coastal salt marshes, countless ponds, and a diversity of boreal-tundra interface habitats, and serves as staging areas for migrating birds, including the Lesser Snow Goose (LSGO). Over the last few decades LSGO populations have increased exponentially due to multiple factors the LSGO is now considered hyper-abundant. Grazing LSGO create large disturbed and barren areas altering vegetation, soil, and ponds, and affecting the ecological integrity of the parks terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems. To assess the extent of goose impacts on vegetation, large spatial scale transects were created by combining selected Hudson Bay Project (HBP), led by Dr. Robert Rockwell, American Museum of Natural History, New York and Parks Canada monitoring sites from different projects in several locations north of the Broad River. The rapid goose terrestrial impact assessment protocol, developed by Dr. Abraham for research on Akimiski Island in James Bay, uses a 100 m2 plot to assess vegetation by functional groups and sub-sample the number of goose droppings. The percent coverage of barren ground (shortened to % barren) is used as coarse assessment of goose terrestrial impact for ecological integrity monitoring for state-of-the-park reporting.