Officials at Cape Breton Highlands National Park say they’ve finished another phase of their project.
Derek Quann, the project manager, says Bring Back the Boreal is an attempt to come up with strategies to restore the forest.
He says 35 moose were harvested on North Mountain; things wrapped up in early December.
Quann tells The Hawk they’ll start to review data now that the harvest is done.
“Where they (moose) were taken and comparing- we just finished conducting an aerial survey of the area, post-harvest, to get a sense of moose distribution and abundance within the surrounding areas.”
Quann says work on the 20 square kilometres was finished in less than a month, so they completed their field objective.
He says they’ll follow up once winter is behind them.
“We need to go back next spring, as we do every spring, and monitor the vegetation, re-measure the vegetation in that area,” he says. “Every time we do a harvest- before the harvest and after the harvest- we measure the state of the vegetation.”
Quann says North Mountain shows good potential for regeneration if they can reduce the influence of moose.
He says they’re in year four of five; the project is expected to be done by March 2019.