Innovation Anthology #312:
The future for woodland caribou in Alberta is grim.
And according to Dr. Rick Schneider with the Integrated Landscape Management Program at the University of Alberta, extinction is just around the corner.
DR. RICK SCHNEIDER: If things don’t change, we know that almost all the herds in the province will be down to less than ten animals within three decades. There’s a couple of exceptions, but by and large, we’re looking at the effective loss of most herds in 30, 40 years.
Dr. Schneider says the direct cause of this loss is increased predation by wolves. But wolves and caribou have been on the landscape together for millenia. So what has tipped the balance?
DR. RICK SCHNEIDER: The leading hypothesis is that it’s our human change of the landscape that has led to these increase in wolf density and increased encounters with caribou, in particular, the increased number of roads and seismic lines and cutblocks that produce more forage possibilities, more access points for deer to get into systems where caribou really at it all to themselves in the past. And now with these other prey species, we’ve got wolf densities going up and caribou end up taking the brunt of the problem.
Dr. Rick Schneider has developed a computer model that looks at the economic trade-offs around saving woodland caribou.
Learn more at InnovationAnthology.com
I’M CHERYL CROUCHER
Guest
,
, , , ,
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: 2010-05-06