The people of the pueblo of santa ANA have lived along the banks of the RIO grande and RIO jemez for over 400 years

They have endured through the centuries by maintaining their traditional, cultural, and spiritual ways that are strongly influence by their connection to the natural world. Like many other tribes, this connection involves the use of traditionally important ungulate species such as mule deer, rocky mountain ELK, and pronghorn. Because these species have significant cultural and spiritual relevance, IT is important to the pueblo to ensure sustainable populations on their lands for current and future generations. A challenge to this, is balancing the predator prey relationship between an increasing mountain lion population and low density, isolated ungulate populations. Another challenge is that, like ungulates, mountain lions are also a traditionally important species, so simply removing all lions from the pueblo is not an acceptable solution. IT is clear to the pueblo, that to increase ungulate populations on its land, IT must increase its ungulate reproduction potential by protecting both adult and neonate ungulates from mountain lion predation and identify and protect corridors used by ungulates to meet their annual needs, or for dispersal or immigration onto the pueblo. Because removing mountain lions that demonstrate a propensity to select ungulate species as prey has been shown to increase low density ungulate populations, the pueblo needs to better understand which lions are selecting ungulates so that IT can present this information to the tribal council and traditional leaders for them to make informed management decisions regarding the fate of such individual lions. However, before this can happen, predation data will need to be collected to identify the individual lions that are negatively impacting ungulate populations. Therefore, the pueblo is proposing to capture and GPS collar six mountain lions, monitor predation events and identify prey species killed by collared lions, and monitor mountain lion movements to identify the locations of wildlife corridors. The proposed project has the full support of the pueblo s tribal council and is in partnership with the US geological survey new mexico cooperative fish and wildlife research unit, new mexico department of game and fish, and the national park service valles caldera national preserve. Furthermore, the proposed project involves building the pueblo s capacity to provide for the benefit and protection of wildlife and educate the community about mountain lions on their land. Lastly, the proposed project will contribute to improving local and regional management plans for mountain lion and ungulates by contributing science based information on kill rates and prey composition of mountain lions in new mexico.