It Takes a Village: This Exchange Student is Crowdsourcing Moose Videos For Her M.S. Research

By Zeke Shomler

I recently got the chance to speak with Marine Bagnoud, an exchange student from the Université de Neuchâtel in Switzerland. She attended UAF this past fall semester to gather field data for her M.S. in Conservation Biology and Animal Behavior. Her goal is to examine moose in the wild and find behavioral patterns, ultimately working with machine learning and statistics to determine patterns.

“For example,” she states, “their alert behavior might depend on the presence of other moose around, or their foraging behavior might be influenced by the type of habitat they are in.”

Much of what Marine has been doing is physically going out into the field to examine moose in the wild. She goes out at dusk and dawn, when they’re most likely to be active, in areas where the habitat matches moose preferences. If she finds some, she takes a look through binoculars to leave them undisturbed, and takes extensive notes on things like moose sex and size, alertness, foraging behavior, group dynamics, and how their behavior changes over time. The comprehensive inventory of behaviors is called an “ethogram,” which helps Marine objectively describe what these beautiful beasts are up to.

A moose in foliage. Photo by Marine Bagnoud.

The really cool thing about this research is the way Marine is including data from people in the community. In addition to going into the field herself, Marine is gathering videos of moose that are sent to her by other Fairbanks residents.

“The videos will help me to enrich my dataset, bringing observations from different locations and contexts,” she states. “I will sample moose behavior just as I would do on the field.”

While it’s not exactly the same as viewing moose in person, videos can really help create a well-rounded and comprehensive dataset.

“Even though I might not be able to measure all the variables I usually measure when I am on the field myself,” she says, “videos are still valuable because the large amount of data compensates for the data potentially missing.”

As the largest foragers in the area, moose are incredibly important to their ecosystem.

As Marine notes, “it is important to understand which factors influence moose behavior in order to protect the environment and its biodiversity, which is critical because of climate change and human destruction.”

Moose behavior is still not well understood, she explained, and much of what we know is focused on aspects of behavior that are relevant for hunting and forest management. Marine is helping close the knowledge gap through her wide-ranging observational research.

Before starting her master’s program, Marine earned a bachelor’s degree in biology, which, in her words, “helped me to get the basic theory I needed to understand animals and their ecosystems.”

During the first year of her M.S. degree program, she has strengthened her knowledge of developing and conducting research—and “on top of that,” she also mentions, “I have read hundreds of papers to learn more about moose and wildlife management!”

Even though she’s now back in Switzerland, you can still send Marine your moose videos to take part in this exciting research project. Videos can be sent through email to marine.bagnoud@unine.ch and through Whatsapp at +41-78-699-3079.