Mapping Zoological Baselines Through Time in the Bear River Range: When Archaeology Meets Wildlife Science

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Machine-Learning Approaches to Studying Ancient Human-Environmental Interactions" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Zoological baselines are key data sets when evaluating climate issues and wildlife conservation projects. This project looks at three types of ecological surveys in the Bear River Basin. 1) A zooarchaeological survey of two cave assemblages, 2) modern camera trap data, and 3) modern museum live trapping surveys. The first survey, using cave assemblages of animal skeleton remains, included remains from Boomerang Cave and Thundershower cave, in the Bear Rive Range of Cache Country in northern Utah. 1938 specimens were analyzed between the two caves. These deposits showed a distribution of species class size expected from known species diversities, and most of the mammalian diversity expected in the area. The other two surveys, camera trapping and live trapping, both bias certain size classes over others. When analyzing the data sets together using machine learning techniques, a zoological baseline can be created for the paleontological and modern Bear River Range. This information then can be analyzed in relation to climate issues and wildlife conservation, to see if and how the baseline has changed over time.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• Machine-Learning Approaches to Studying Ancient Human-Environmental Interactions

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 51334