Wildlife Survey Field Methods – Online, November 20-22, 2023

Wildlife Survey Field Methods (WSFM) is a fully online, applied three-day course that provides an introduction and overview of commonly used survey methods for a wide variety of mammals.

Using live online instruction, demonstrations, and student-led field exercises, participants learn to conduct a number of ground-based surveys, and the advantages and limitations to them. These represent the commonly conducted mammalian wildlife survey techniques throughout North America. 

The course covers the following topics: 

• Why we survey
• How we survey
• What, When, and Where we survey
• Survey methods for direct observation
• Sign and survey methods for indirect observation
• Trapping and capture methods
• Carcasses and the information derived from them
• Habitat: wildlife trees and coarse woody debris
• Special topics: wildlife diseases, tagging and marking animals, estimating abundance by mark-recapture. 

This course includes all orders of mammals in North America and a large variety of methods. Thus it is a survey course providing an introduction to a very wide variety of subjects and taxa and is not in-depth on any one topic. It is intended as an introduction and comprehensive overview of wildlife survey methods of North America.