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Division of Wildlife: Wildlife Tracker now a core planning tool for WRI proposals
Summary
DWR staff showcased Wildlife Tracker — a web tool that maps animal GPS locations, migration corridors and WRI project layers — and offered guidance for including tracker maps and metadata in WRI proposals.
The Utah Division of Wildlife Resources urged partners at the Watershed Restoration Initiative conference to use Wildlife Tracker when planning restoration projects and preparing WRI proposals, stressing that tracker output is location-based observation data, not a habitat model.
Makeda (Wildlife Migration Initiative Coordinator, Division of Wildlife Resources) led a demonstration of Wildlife Tracker, showing users how to query collared-animal heat maps and migration corridors, combine those layers with WRI project polygons, and export maps and metadata for proposals. She cautioned that absence of collar data does not imply absence of wildlife and that heat maps show recorded locations for specific collared animals, not the entire population.
Makeda recommended two ways to use Wildlife Tracker: 1) query the platform first to identify high-use areas for project siting, and 2) use tracker output to document why a preselected WRI project area would benefit wildlife. She advised including at least two maps in a WRI proposal (project detail and landscape context), listing the species, number of animals represented and the query date range on the map, and including text that explains why the tracker output supports the proposed treatment.
Technical notes: Wildlife Tracker contains multi-year collar datasets (examples shown included corridors mapped 2018–2021 and heat maps for 2022–2024); it includes over 30 GPS-tracked species where available; some sensitive or conservation species data are restricted to researchers. The DWR added a sign-in step to address legal restrictions: users must certify they will not use location data to gain a hunting advantage and must declare conflicts or work purposes.
Makeda said DWR staff are available to help partners run queries and build proposal-ready maps and that Wildlife Tracker outputs are appropriate evidence for WRI project proposals when accompanied by explanatory text and metadata.
Conference presenters and attendees discussed combining Wildlife Tracker outputs with other public datasets like WRI project history, LANDFIRE vegetation and range trend studies for fuller site assessments.
