Carnivore Community in the Apostle Islands

Our new research paper studying the carnivore community in the Apostle Islands has been published. The distribution and occupancy of carnivores in the Apostle Islands is largely unknown. We monitored 19 islands with 160 functioning camera traps from 2014-2017, from which we collected 203,385 photographs across 49,280 trap nights.

We documented detected 10 of the 12 terrestrial carnivores found in Wisconsin. Detection rates for species were generally higher in summer than winter. We estimated that terrestrial carnivore species varied in the number of islands they were detected on from 1 island for gray wolves to 13 islands for black bears. The number of carnivores occupying an island also varied substantively from 1 species on Michigan Island to 10 species on Stockton Island. Island size and connectivity between islands appear important for the persistence of the carnivore community in the Apostle Islands