I guess I can't really show you on the screen very well, but it's a little app. When you click on it, a table comes up asking you to input how many bulls, cows, calves, and unidentified animals you saw during a day hunting in the field, and the number of hours you were hunting on that day.
When a moose licence is issued to a hunter, they receive the request from Environment and Sustainable Resource Development asking them to participate in this voluntary program to contribute information on the number of moose they see each day in the field. The idea for this app came from a visit I made to Norway several years ago when I learned about their program, where every day at the end of the day hunters have to report in at a check station and tell how many moose they saw that day. That number of moose seen per day is very highly correlated with the number of moose in the population.
In Alberta we spend $600,000 a year monitoring moose populations. That's only enough to fly 10 wildlife management units. It costs $60,000 to do one because it takes helicopter time, it's extremely expensive, and at that rate we're only covering 10% of the moose wildlife management units in Alberta. So every 10 years we get an index of how many moose there are in the population. This way we could do it by engaging the hunters and do it for almost free.
As the moose hunter enters how many moose they have seen into their app, even if they are out in the bush somewhere and they don't have cellphone coverage, as they are driving home the iPhone or Android-based machine will beam the data up to a cellphone tower and it comes right into my computer.