Moose as a value and pest. Management in a patchy environment

The seasonal migration pattern of the moose (alces alces) causes management problems. Landowners facing large grazing damages on young pine trees during the winter, often obtain low harvesting benefits in the fall because the migratory population is harvested in a resident area. The scope of this paper is to analyse this asymmetry between grazing damages and harvest benefits among landowners in a stylised bio-economic framework. We consider two areas, two landowners and two sub-populations managed within a unified management scheme. In the first part of the paper it is demonstrated that setting harvesting quotas when neglecting the migration pattern reduces overall profitability and, at the same time, causes serious harvesting misallocations among the areas. In the second part of the paper winter harvesting is introduced, and it is shown how this type of harvesting can work in the direction of redistribution of benefits in line with grazing damages. In addition it is shown that sequential harvesting, harvesting during the winter as well as during the fall, in fact can increase total profits even if the price of the winter harvesting is lower.