Methods

Data Collection

Data was collected in a series of meadows and adjacent forests that comprise the spring neo-natal range of the Ronald Lake wood bison herd north of Fort McMurray, Alberta (approx. 58.00 °, -111.94 °) (Figure 4 and 5). Four treatments were used in data collection: meadow, forest, loaf and recovering loaf. Vegetation data was captured using 1 m2 hoop quadrats for all treatments (Figure 3) . Species and ground cover were estimated and plants were identified to species. For the meadow and forest treatments, the cover of shrubs taller than 1.3 m was estimated using 20 m2 circular quadrat.

Figure 3. 1 m2 hoop quadrat used in vegetation sampling in Ronald Lake wood bison project (Hillman, 2024)

Figure 4. Study Area map showing the 4 types of plots split into their geographic sections. Commonly used bison trails are depicted in orange. Some sections had duplicate treatments, including 2 loafs and meadow plots in the north and mid-north sections, while there was also 2 recovering loafs in the north section. Additionally, no forest plot was present in the north section, while no recovering loafs are present in the middle and south plots.

Figure 5. Study area location relative to a small area of northern Alberta. Fort McMurray can be seen south of the study area for reference.

Sampling Design

Two different sampling designs were used, one for the forest and meadow controls and one for the loafs and recovering loafs. For the meadow and forest control groups a random center point was chosen, for the forest plots this point was 50 meters from the edge of meadow, while for the meadow, this was simply a random point within the meadow (Figure 6). Meanwhile, the loafs and recovering loafs were split into 3 sections (Figure 7), first, the bare section which is bare soil, second, the edge section which occurs when the bare section transitions to vegetated surface that is different from the surrounding meadow, and lastly the third, interior section, which was sampled where the vegetation changes to appear more like the surrounding meadow vegetation. The plots were grouped based on geographic location in the meadow (Figure 4) and were sampled a single time in late August 2024.

Figure 6. Sampling design for the Meadow and Forest treatments. Red circles represent the 1 m2 hoop quadrats, the larger black circles represents the 20 square meter transects for shrubs.

Figure 7. Sampling design for the Loaf and Recovering Loaf treatment types. Each red circle represents a 1 m2 hoop quadrat, the loafs were split into habitats (bare, edge and interior) with the quadrats arrayed out in each cardinal direction from a center point.

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