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A BIG paper came out yesterday about Endangered+Threatened caribou and their habitats in western Canada. This is big news because it tells us what the "caribou conservation report card" looks like for 2000-2018. It's not an A+. But why? a thread
: https://conbio.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/csp2.437
: https://conbio.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/csp2.437
The primary threat to woodland caribou populations is broad-scale human-caused change to landscapes. Such changes come in the form of forest removal, mining, roads + seismic lines, and oil/gas. These changes disrupt landscape characteristics and associated predatorâprey dynamics.
This paper focused on changes in caribou habitat. They wanted to know: did caribou habitat loss shows a decreasing trend over time (i.e., is caribou habitat getting "better"?), using changes in forest cover as a proxy of changes in caribou habitat.
The take-home message is that caribou habitat is not getting better, despite the threatened and endangered status, and associated legislation designed to recover the species. In fact, caribou habitat is getting ~3-6% WORSE per year, not better.
This unsettling finding brought to us by folks from @ABbiodiversity @MelanieDickie @HebblewhiteLab @SophieLGilbert @StanBoutin et al, have some key implications for the future of caribou, resource extraction, and the people who rely on either or both.
First, if we don't get serious about protecting and restoring caribou habitat, we will lose caribou. Feel free to @ me. This is essentially a fact, and the >12 extirpated populations in the last 20 years stand as a testament, and the >20 declining populations add more weight.
2, a variety of short-term recovery measures are being used to prop up caribou populations while habitat recovers. These include wolf and moose reductions, translocations, feeding, and maternal penning. Many of these are working to increase abundance and avert extirpation, BUT
They are predicated on the "habitat recovery" piece and there is little evidence that habitat is being meaningfully recovered. In fact it's getting worse in many places.
This all seems pretty depressing. Should we throw our hands in the air and give up on caribou? Perhaps not. There is hope. One example is the Indigenous-led recovery/protection of caribou AND their habitat by the West Moberly + Saulteau First Nations.
Here short-term recovery measures (wolf reductions and maternal penning) were successfully used to avert the near-certain extirpation of caribou while habitat protection was ongoing (2M acres signed into protection Feb 2020). https://watershedsentinel.ca/articles/historic-partnership-to-protect-2m-acres-of-caribou-habitat/
In this example, the significant protection should mean that the loss of caribou habitat will NOT exceed gain anymore, and the key question is: how much can we accelerate gain and create a self-sustaining caribou population.
