Innovation Anthology #311:
Over the last few decades, whitetail deer have expanded their range into the boreal forest. They’ve even appeared in the Territories.
Kim Dawe is a PhD student at the University of Alberta. She’s researching why deer are invading the boreal.
KIM DAWE: Two of the main working hypotheses are that land use is increasing the amount of food on the landscape for deer, And so you get agriculture, which is high quality and abundant food. You get forestry cutblocks which provide good food at certain parts of the regrowth stages. And then the energy sector has lines going through the bush, again through regrowth. Alternatively, they lose a lot of energy just moving through deep snow, and therma-regulating from cold temperatures. And so, if climate is changing in terms of less snow, warmer temperatures, and shorter winters, then that leads us to a climate change hypothesis
According to Kim Dawe, the invasion of whitetail deer into the boreal forest poses a huge threat to woodland caribou. That’s because where deer go, wolves follow. And wolves eat caribou, too.
Thanks today to the NSERC-ACR Industrial Chair in Integrated Landscape Management
FOR INNOVATION ANTHOLOGY
I’M CHERYL CROUCHER
Guest
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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: 2010-04-29