Greater than a dozen bison are actually being electronically tracked throughout 100 hectares of rolling hillside at Buffalo Pound Provincial Park in southern Saskatchewan.
Park workers have hooked up ear tags with GPS capabilities to 14 of the animals on the park, simply over 50 kilometres west of Regina.
The solar-powered tags transmit a sign to a close-by communications tower, which then offers the real-time location of the bison to a pc program again on the park’s customer centre each quarter-hour.
Individuals who go to the centre can view the bison location on a dashboard displayed on a TV display screen.
Dave Bjarnason, the park’s supervisor, stated Buffalo Pound is the one provincial park in Saskatchewan with bison, which have been there since 1972. The tags have been first utilized in October 2024.
“The age-old query has all the time been from our guests: ‘The place are the buffalo?'” stated Bjarnason. “Typically the disappointment is, you drive all the best way down there, rise up to the lookout level and so they cannot see the buffalo.”
The bison seem on the TV display screen as little white dots and a corresponding title on a satellite tv for pc view of the paddock.
Tags used for analysis
Dale Gross, a grasslands ecologist with Saskatchewan Parks, stated the GPS tags will assist him analysis the grazing patterns of the bison and the way they work together with their atmosphere.
A key a part of Gross’s analysis focuses on the place the bison graze and the way it impacts what they eat.
“So if we might do a small, prescribed burn within the bison paddock, that grass that grows again in additional palatable, extra nutritious, and the bison search that out to satisfy their dietary necessities,” he stated.
Gross will use the GPS knowledge to maneuver round salt and water set out for the bison in order that they do not graze the identical space time and again, which can even assist the wholesome grass develop again.
His findings can be utilized to farms with cattle, to assist the animals eat more healthy forage.
Gross stated bison are essential to the grassland ecology of the Prairies.
“Their interactions with the grasslands over 1000’s of years are why our soils are so fertile for rising annual crops,” he stated.
“The bugs, the pollinators that we have now … quite a lot of that may be traced again to the bison. That is how important they have been to the survival of the Indigenous folks right here way back and us collectively proper now.”
Bjarnason stated the GPS interface can also be out there on an app, which presently can solely be seen by park workers. Plans are within the works to make the app public sooner or later.
His hope is that teams, like faculties, can then come out to the park to make use of the app as an academic instrument.
“It is all the time an enlightening expertise to see [the bison],” Bjarnason stated. “We wish to enhance the chance to see the animals, which is able to then enhance the curiosity in understanding them.”
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