摘要：Livelihood systems that depend on mobile resources must constantly adapt to change. For people living inpermanent settlements, environmental changes that affect the distribution of a migratory species may reduce the availability ofa primary food source, with the potential to destabilize the regional social-ecological system. Food security for Arctic indigenouspeoples harvesting barren ground caribou (Rangifer tarandus granti) depends on movement patterns of migratory herds.Quantitative assessments of physical, ecological, and social effects on caribou distribution have proven difficult because of thesignificant interannual variability in seasonal caribou movement patterns. We developed and evaluated a modeling approachfor simulating the distribution of a migratory herd throughout its annual cycle over a multiyear period. Beginning with spatialand temporal scales developed in previous studies of the Porcupine Caribou Herd of Canada and Alaska, we used satellite collarlocations to compute and analyze season-by-season probabilities of movement of animals between habitat zones under twoalternative weather conditions for each season. We then built a set of transition matrices from these movement probabilities,and simulated the sequence of movements across the landscape as a Markov process driven by externally imposed seasonalweather states. Statistical tests showed that the predicted distributions of caribou were consistent with observed distributions,and significantly correlated with subsistence harvest levels for three user communities. Our approach could be applied to othercaribou herds and could be adapted for simulating the distribution of other ungulates and species with similarly large interannualvariability in the use of their range
