Innovation Anthology #147: AIHS Heritage Scientist and Professor, Pharmacology & Neurosciece
The Integrated Landscape Management program led by Professor Stan Boutin has looked for many years at what industry could do to lessen its impact on boreal
wildlife.
New computer models can help predict future changes. But there are still many unknowns.
So now Dr. Boutin is shifting his focus to solving what he calls “key uncertainties” –
One is the introduction of exotic species into the boreal ecosystem.
DR. STAN BOUTIN: And a couple of them that really come to mind are whitetail deer and coyotes and a third one is cowbirds that have potentially big effects on forest birds because they are nest parasites. They lay their eggs in other birds nests and that has negative effects on the birds. So these things have been around but they haven’t been very big players in the boreal forest. But we have this inkling that they are now becoming big players. They are much more common, much more widespread. And so the question is, why is that happening? And secondly, what are the implications of that change in the system?
One documented implication is that deer are leading to a decline in woodland caribou.
Thanks today to the CHAIR IN INTEGRATED LANDSCAPE MANAGEMENT.
Learn more at www.InnovationAnthology.com
I’M CHERYL CROUCHER
Guest
William Colmers, Professor,
Faculty of Medicine & Dentistry, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada,
Sponsor
NSERC Industrial Research Chair in Integrated Landscape Management
The Integrated Landscape Management Chair is developing a toolkit for ecologically informed land use planning. At the heart of this toolkit is a suite of models capable of integrating multiple land use activities over large areas and long time scales to explore the future impacts of todays land use decisions. The models do this by linking human actions to indicators of ecological, economic, and social condition. They are constrained by their ability to adequately represent the dynamics of complex systems, and our current research emphasis aims to reduce the uncertainties over the impacts of invasive organisms on species at risk in Canadas boreal forest.
The ILM Chair is an initiative of the Department of Biological Sciences at the University of Alberta, with sponsors and collaborators in academia, government, and the private sector.
Program Date: 2008-07-01