Bethany Friesenhahn
Texas A&M University Kingsville
Research Specialist I / M.S. in Range and Wildlife Management / Caesar Kleberg Wildlife Research Institute (CKWRI)
Monitoring Spatial Use, Resource Selection, and Crop Damage of Wild Pigs Amongst an Agricultural Landscape.
I am a wildlife researcher for CKWRI and am also pursuing my Master’s Degree in Range and Wildlife Management. My research project is focused on wild pigs and how they negatively impact agriculture. I became interested in research with wild pigs because it was an opportunity to bring my passion for the outdoors, hunting, and agriculture into the workplace. I grew up around farming and ranching in Texas where wild pigs are a nuisance, devastating, and costly to landowners. The objective is to monitor wild pig movements with the use of GPS collars to determine home ranges and resource selection throughout an agricultural landscape. I am also monitoring approximately 750 acres of corn fields through use of drone and ground truthing to quantify pig damage and game cameras to estimate pig densities at different growth stages of corn. The drone flights allow us to create a mosaic image of each field to be able to monitor and quantify pig damage to corn at a larger scale. From the data we collect, our goal is to better understand wild pig movements to help guide Wildlife Services and landowner control efforts to be more efficient in eliminating the wild pig problem.