As of March 2009, CARMA has develop two manuals with associated protocols to allow researchers and managers to monitor their herds and be able to compare their results with monitoring data from other herds. The body condition manual explains the important indicators to collect when handling a caribou or reindeer while the demographic manual outlines the standard methods of monitoring populations and how to report the findings in a consistent statistical manner.
The CARMA Network is acting as a forum for documenting and assembling indicators to monitor caribou and their environment. CARMA is taking the lead to describe monitoring indicators in a manual that also includes standardized protocols from previous studies on Rangifer and other cervids and newly developed protocols relevant to community and hunter evaluation. The manual and protocols will ensure that we are collecting and managing data in a comparable way. The target audience for the manual is technical staff (biologists, wildlife technicians, fish and wildlife officers) and researchers that are affiliated with the CARMA Network. The standardized monitoring data will be used to report on the status and trends in barren-ground caribou (wild reindeer and caribou) in the circumpolar regions.
The body condition manual describes monitoring at the scale of the individual caribou and is focused on health and physical condition. Although information is collected at one scale, it can be integrated and interpreted at another scale. For example, hunters observe how fat individual caribou are, and the information from hunters in all communities is compiled to rate the body condition (based on fat) of the herd in that particular year.
Be sure to "view resource" to get access to the body condition manual, as well as two levels of sampling protocols.