UAA students are used to "howling" for the Seawolves, but last year, a small group of undergraduates had the opportunity to study Southcentral Alaska’s wild gray wolves thanks to a partnership between the Alaska Department of Fish and Game (ADF&G) and UAA's Alaska Center for Conservation Science (ACCS). 

Undergraduate environmental sciences major Jonathan Humpal learned about the opportunity through a job posting he saw on campus. Humpal initially planned to study aviation technology at UAA but was considering switching majors to environmental science at the time he saw the job listing.

"I applied for it, and I didn't even think I would be qualified for the job, but I ended up getting the job," Humpal said. "That solidified my want to switch degrees over to natural sciences."

Under the guidance of ACCS’s Amanda Droghini, the students assisted ADF&G by categorizing over 12,000 photos and videos that ADF&G captured from game cameras and video collars attached to gray wolves in Southcentral Alaska.

Game cameras (also called camera traps) are motion-activated remote cameras that are commonly used by wildlife biologists and hunters alike. In this particular study, ADF&G deployed game cameras to document wolf abundance and the diversity of carnivores and scavengers in the area. Video collars are a fairly new technology in the field of wildlife biology that allow biologists to see the world through the animal’s point of view. 
Captured as part of a 2023 pilot project, the collection of videos consists of 10-second clips taken every 10 to 20 minutes. According to ADF&G, the collection will provide biologists with "further insight into the social behaviors, activity levels and predator-prey dynamics of wolves."

 

 

"With a camera trap study you capture tons of files," said biological sciences major Bradley Smith, one of the students on the project. "So a big challenge with that kind of a study is [that] you generate such a large number of files that have to be classified and filtered.That's a huge time and energy investment you have to make before any conclusions can be formed."

The student technicians were responsible for manually investigating the footage in order to identify what animals appeared. 

“I would flag files that it would have a species, maybe like a fleeting image of a bird, mustelid, wolverine or a wolf,” Smith said. “A lot of times if I couldn't identify the specific bird or mustelid [...] that would get flagged for further investigation.”

Learning to identify these species caught on the game camera became one of Humpal’s favorite parts of the study. 

“I grew up in Central California, near Yosemite National Park, so the animals I grew up with are different from the animals here in Alaska,” he said. 

While inspecting the footage from the wolves’ collar cameras, the student technicians worked to create a special data table known as an ethogram. 

“An ethogram is a table of behaviors that an animal exhibits,” said Smith. “It’s used to systematically record and study animal behavior.”

Identifying and recording these wolf behaviors became part of the learning experience for the student technicians. 

“There was some video of the wolves eating fish out of the river,” Humpal said. “I personally didn't know that they did that.”

The wolves’ collar cameras occasionally captured moments of suspense. “There was also a really cool clip [...] of the wolves confronting a brown bear,” Humpal said. “I think they just had a standoff and then they went their separate ways.” 

Smith feels his participation in this project will benefit his career goal to work as a wildlife biologist: “I’ve developed work experience and professional contacts in a professional setting that directly supports students, which is an amazing opportunity here at UAA.”

For Humpal, who initially worried he would not be qualified for the role, serving as a technician on this project was a confidence-building experience. “This was my first technician position ever,” he said. Humpal, who spent much of his life outdoors — from hiking in Yosemite National Park with his family growing up, to conducting land surveys in Okinawa, Japan during his service in the United States Marine Corps — says that this project inspired him to study environmental science.

“I was feeling kind of lost — feeling like I needed to switch degrees,” he said. “I thought science and ecology and conservation were interesting, but I wasn't sure about it. After working on this project I was very sure that that’s what I wanted to pursue. It definitely sparked a lot of inspiration in me.”