What do you think can or should be done?
Maybe we should ask the W$F? They're good at selling hunts and raising money, just not good at doing much else for Alaska sheep. Still waiting to hear of 3 successful projects they've performed in Alaska with any sort of measurable outcome. Hell, I'd take just one example. 7 years and nothing to show for it except for back slaps and atta boys for selling governors tags. The sub-legal ram shot on the governors tag this year was a nice touch.
Honestly, I don't think there is really much that can be done. Everything is just a band aid, or pushes harvest to another user group. Weather is 100% the controlling factor for sheep, virtually everywhere in Alaska. All climate models predict that Alaska will be getting warmer and wetter, none of which will be beneficial to our sheep. I work on multi $B projects and everyone of them includes climate modeling to inform future risk. Some areas there will be less water, others more water. There are 40+ different climate models and virtually all of them predict similar outcomes at varying magnitude and time.
The limited harvest areas including the parks have seen similar declines. While they may have more older rams, the population/age dynamic is similar, gaps in age classes, etc. The winter kill is the controlling factor, period. All other factors are marginal.
Intensive predator management in some areas could help some, but as far as I understand they can't or won't implement IPM for sheep as they are not a subsistence animal. Mortality in some areas is highly skewed to weather/avalanche death while its predator take in others, so its not a one fits all.
Limiting hunting just limits who gets to kill what. Sill only so many "surplus" to harvest.
Closing it wont' do anything either. Not like saving a couple rams is going to magically increase sheep populations.
Say you have 10,000 sheep, and lose 50% them in the winter. On average with favorable conditions you're lucky to increase populations by 5% a year with normal mortality. That's 15 years to get back to your original population prior to the die off. Now say you lose another 50% 8-9 years into the rebuilding cycle... now you're looking at anther 20 years to rebuild to the original 10,000. The sheep population isn't coming back before I'm too old to hunt them.
I'm not going to stop hunting sheep unless forced to. Limiting my take to some silly 1:4 or something harvest per year isn't going to do anything except let someone else shoot the same sheep. The writing is on the wall.
Yikes.
That is a pretty grim outlook. I was hoping we were at the bottom and would soon start working our way back up.
Is your model something you can share?
I would imagine future population modeling would be darn near impossible to do accurately given the wild range of winter weather mass mortality events?
I won't share my model, sorry.
Predictions are not hard, and there are many methods to simulate outcomes given parameters with limits. We do simulations all the time with far more complex data sets and parameters. You don't get exact numbers, but you get a range high/low of probable outcome. Predicting mortality is tough, but we know the high and low boundaries and the probability of them occurring, which is all you really need.
