I have finally secured a copy of the 2013 Western Hudson Bay mark-recapture study produced by Environment Canada.
The pertinent figure is below: as you can see, there was no declining trend in Western Hudson Bay polar bears between 2000 and 2011. Click to enlarge.
I have relatives visiting so I don’t have time to do an in-depth summary but the report’s opening “Summary” is copied below and a pdf provided. More later when I have had time to look at it more closely. Background on the issue here.
Comments Off on W Hudson Bay polar bear mark-recapture study report 2013 – at last
Posted in Advocacy, Conservation Status, Population
Tagged Canadian Wildlife Service, Environment Canada, Lunn, mark-recapture, misleading, Nunavut, polar bears, population estimates, Regehr, stable population, Stirling, western hudson bay, withholding data
Leading polar bear biologists knew by November 2013 that mark-recapture studies showed the Western Hudson Bay subpopulation had not changed appreciably since 2004 but none said so. This includes Steven Amstrup and Ian Stirling at Polar Bears International, Andrew Derocher (University of Alberta), and Nick Lunn (Canadian Wildlife Service), all of whom are (or have been) extensively involved in Western Hudson Bay polar bear research and have made recent statements to the media on this topic.
More details have emerged about the status of Western Hudson Bay (WHB) polar bears (reported a few days ago here), reported this morning in NunatsiaqOnline, excerpts below.
The story reveals that there are two Canadian Wildlife Service (Environment Canada) reports containing population estimates of Western Hudson Bay polar bears – one produced in 2011 and another in November 2013 (reversing the 2011 conclusion) – that have not been made public.
[In contrast, Nunavut Government reports on their 2011 population estimate, based on aerial surveys, were made public in both draft and final report formats (and have since been peer-reviewed and published)]
The conclusion of the 2013 report, quoted in this mornings article, suggests that some of our most vocal polar bear specialists have been misleading the public about the status of the Western Hudson Bay population for the last year.
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Comments Off on Public misled about W Hudson Bay bears since November 2013
Posted in Advocacy, Conservation Status, Population
Tagged Amstrup, Canadian Wildlife Service, Derocher, Environment Canada, Lunn, mark-recapture, misleading, Nunavut, polar bears, population estimates, stable population, Stirling, western hudson bay, withholding data
I’ve already commented on the 2013 update of polar bear population status released by the IUCN Polar Bear Specialist Group (PBSG).
However, I thought it might be interesting to graph the changes in global population estimates over time (from 1981-2013) — not just the actual estimates from PBSG status tables (with their min/max error ranges) but those totals plus the so-called “inaccurate” estimates that the PBSG have dropped from their accounts in recent (2005-2013) assessments: Chukchi Sea, East Greenland, Queen Elizabeth Islands (now known as the “Arctic Basin”), and Laptev Sea.
In 2001, those “inaccurate” estimates contributed 5,000-5,400 bears to the global total, but now they’re gone — no bears from those regions contribute to the official totals listed on recent PBSG status tables.
Adding those dropped estimates back into the global totals makes it possible to generate a graph in which the global estimates are truly comparable over time.
To see how the dropped estimates influenced the perception of population change over time, I’ve also graphed the estimates given by the PBSG in their status tables. I’ve combined the two into one image (Fig. 1, click to enlarge) to make comparison easy.
UPDATE 5 December 2014: Links to more recent posts relevant to this issue added below. The most recent numbers, added 31 May 2015, are here.
UPDATE 26 March 2019: See “Latest global polar bear abundance ‘best guess’ estimate is 39,000 (26,000-58,000)”
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Comments Off on Graphing polar bear population estimates over time
Posted in Conservation Status, Population
Tagged Chukchi, East Greenland, estimate, graph, Laptev Sea, PBSG, polar bear, polar bear numbers, Polar Bear Specialist Group, population decline, population estimates, population increase, population over time, Queen Elizabeth Islands, Rode, stable population, status tables, timeline
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