Counting Coyotes: Lessons Learned from Citizen Science

Apex carnivores shape ecosystems through a complex system of predation and competition. With the extirpation of wolves, mountain lions and bears from Illinois, coyotes have become an apex predator in the prairie state. And while this species has been well-studied, documenting patterns of coyote occurrence statewide or within small spatial scales, particularly in urban areas, is still somewhat limited. Yet this information is critical to wildlife biologists as they seek to manage the potential for human-coyote conflicts and to better understand the influence that coyotes have on other species.

Limited resources often preclude wildlife researchers from gathering species occurrence data using mark-recapture or radio telemetry studies across broad geographic regions—which is one reason why citizen science can be so valuable. Wildlife sightings reported by citizen scientists have proven to be an efficient and low-cost way to gather species occurrence data. One form of citizen science that is maybe not well-known to the public, but which is widely used by wildlife management agencies across the country, is hunter observations of game and non-game species. Data collected by hunters provides an economically efficient way for wildlife managers to estimate and monitor the statewide distribution and abundance of coyotes.

Of course, as with other types of citizen science, there are limitations regarding the data. Researchers from the Illinois Natural History Survey and University of Illinois recently published a study that highlighted some potential limitations of using citizen science data, namely the importance of precisely recording the sighting locations. They contacted a randomly selected sample of archery deer hunters in Illinois and asked the hunters to record data each day that they hunted. While in the field, the hunters recorded the date, time of day, number of hours hunted, county hunted, and the number of target wildlife species observed, including coyotes. Two of the goals that the researchers had were to see if selected landscape variables influenced coyote occupancy and to compare coyote occupancy across the 10 Wildlife Management Units (WMUs) that are used by the Illinois Department of Natural Resources to develop and implement wildlife management and conservation programs in Illinois.

It won’t come as a shock to learn that the 1,240 hunters who participated in the study reported seeing coyotes in all but two of the 102 counties in Illinois. However, while the researchers had hoped to find landscape variables (such as forest patch density, forest and grassland shape index, agricultural cover, and urbanization) related to coyote occupancy of an area, they failed to detect any species-habitat relationships. And though they did find differences in coyote occupancy between the WMUs, the results were a bit muddy.

The researchers suggested these results may have been because coyotes are common throughout Illinois and are also generalists when it comes to their habitat use. But they also noted that a mismatch in scale was possibly an important limitation of their study and one that other researchers should keep in mind when designing their own studies. In this case, landscape variables were measured at the county level, since precise hunter location data was unavailable due to privacy concerns, but the hunters recorded sightings of coyotes at a much smaller scale (i.e., their hunting sites). This study shines a light on the limitations of modeling species occupancy as a function of landscape features when precise participant locations are unknown.

And then of course, to determine whether or not coyotes occupy an area requires that the observer actually sees a coyote. And that’s where the needle in a haystack analogy comes in handy. Just because an observer doesn’t see any needles in the haystack doesn’t mean there aren’t any needles, or in this case coyotes. In this study, two variables had strong effects on the detection of coyotes—hunting during the morning hours and hunting for a greater number of hours. The first finding makes sense since coyotes are crepuscular or nocturnal and are more likely to still be out during the morning hours than during the afternoon. So the results of this study reinforce the importance of considering the natural history of a species when designing a citizen science study. And the second finding is a no-brainer—increased effort equaled increased detection of coyotes, which reinforces the importance of making sure the citizen scientists are well prepared for their task. Archery hunters are well-suited to observe and accurately identify coyotes. But in citizen science studies that focus on species that are hard to find or to accurately identify, the researchers noted the need to account for imperfect detection in order not to underreport the species’ occurrence.

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Laura Kammin is an Educational Programming Specialist with Lewis and Clark Community College. She formerly held positions at Illinois-Indiana Sea Grant, University of Illinois Extension, Prairie Rivers Network and the Illinois Natural History Survey. She received her master’s degree in wildlife ecology from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.