Effects of Development on Elk Land Use

For this class project, we estimated the density of elk in Rocky Mountain National Park and the town of Estes Park, Colorado, using data from monthly ground surveys averaged across winter for the years 2001, 2006, and 2011. The park management built exclosures (for the elk, not for people) six years ago in 2008. The exclosures cover approximately 6% of the elk's winter range, although they are quite present in specific regions, such as Moraine Park. Currently the National Park Service is seeking to understand whether these exclosures have had an impact on the spatial distribution of the elk during different times across the winter range. Typically the distribution is assessed using abundance estimates, but a recent question was whether the density of the elk would be a useful quantification of the spatial distribution.

A second component of this project was to examine the effects of development within Rocky Mountain National Park (exclosures) as well as the ongoing development of the town of Estes Park, on the distribution of the elk in the winter range (Theabald, 1997).