Indigenous Knowledge and Community‐Derived Counts Produce Robust Wildlife Population Estimates: Roosevelt Elk in Karuk Aboriginal Territory

Community and citizen science-based conservation projects have proliferated in recent years and hold promise for further incorporating Indigenous science and ways of knowing in conservation practice and decision-making more broadly. Tribally led efforts that engage local community members in the data collection process can take advantage of generations of intimate place-based knowledge for improved ecological monitoring, increased policy buy-in, and ultimately more effective conservation practice in socio-ecological systems. In this study, we detail community science research initiated and led by the Karuk Wildlife Team (KWT) to monitor Roosevelt elk (<i>Cervus canadensis</i>, Karuk: <i>Ishyuux</i>) in their core winter range along the Klamath River in Karuk Ancestral Territory in northern California. Elk are a culturally and ecologically significant species that were extirpated from the area through overhunting after Euro-American colonization in the mid-19th century. They were reintroduced in the 1980s and are now annually harvested, necessitating effective monitoring. Encouraged by conversations with community members, the KWT began collecting detailed information on weekly elk sightings from community members along the Klamath River including date, time, number of elk seen, and approximate spatial coordinates (up to about ±200 m, accounting for the fact that elk groups could be observed from the highway on either side of the river). We fit an unmarked spatial capture-recapture (uSCR) model in a Bayesian framework to community reports of elk from the winter of 2020-2021 to estimate their population density in our study area. We incorporated concurrent GPS monitoring data of three elk in this population to improve the spatial parameter, sigma, of our uSCR models. Our model estimated 0.56 elk/km², a density that falls within expected ranges and mirrors the results of a camera trapping study we conducted in the same area. These results demonstrate the efficacy of a community-driven monitoring protocol for harvested wildlife populations and the power of Tribally led science for effective conservation.