Using Innovative Techniques for Assessing Herbivore Animal Diet

Many unknowns exist regarding baseline data for natural resources on Native American reservations. Existing technologies to examine and assess wildlife diet are becoming more costly, time-consumptive, and inefficient in their abilities to produce reliable results. This project will help alleviate both issues by introducing a new and innovative technology for assessing wildlife diet for a Native American tribal wildlife resource. The new conservation technology may prove more efficient at producing results for wildlife than the old method, will provide baseline data for the Native American tribal Fish and Wildlife Department, and will provide knowledge that can then be transferred to Native American tribal natural resources personnel for future use in conservation efforts. The main objectives of this study are to 1) use an innovative conservation technology to assess wildlife diet for a socially and economically important natural resource: mule deer, 2) provide baseline wildlife diet data to the Navajo Nation Department of Fish and Wildlife for said natural resource, 3) compare results from the new diet assessment technique to an older, well used technique and 4) transfer the knowledge from the innovative diet technique to the Navajo Nation Department of Fish and Wildlife for future conservation use.