Climate change is a wild problem

Forests, wetlands, grasslands and other natural areas have a big role to play in helping the world take action on climate change. That is the message Wildlife Conservation Society took to the UN Climate Summit in New York in September.  We emphasized the importance of nature-based solutions to world leaders, including the critical need to stop deforestation and protect carbon sinks, such as Canada’s boreal region. As WCS President & CEO Dr. Cristián Samper noted, “We must all recognize that the foundation of all climate solutions depends on the continuing function of the global land sink — a massive, beneficial carbon sink provided largely by the world’s great intact forests that soak up a quarter of all humanity’s carbon emissions each year.” 

Boreal forests hold tremendous stores of carbon, most of which is contained in soils and peatlands, and represent among the largest pools of terrestrial carbon in the world, exceeding even those of tropical forests by some estimates. That’s why we have been using our science to advocate for new approaches to development in places like the far north in Ontario. We are also highlighting the central climate role of large intact areas for wildlife adaptation. In north-central British Columbia, for example, the vast and undisturbed Muskwa-Kechika area provides increasingly important climate ramps for wildlife that need to move to cooler alpine zones.

Canada is fortunate to have vast areas of intact ecosystems, but we need to do a much better job of stewarding these areas rather than simply relying on their remoteness to keep them from becoming carbon sources instead of carbon sinks.

Climate change impacts, such as more frequent and intense wildfires, can release carbon. Protecting large intact areas can also protect critical carbon storehouses.

Keeping Yukon wild

Yukon Territory is one wild place. But keeping it this way in the face of great change will take greater recognition of the need to be proactive in protecting the wildlife and wild places across the territory and a recognition that we need a less human-centric approach to deciding when and where industrial development is appropriate. WCS Scientist Dr. Don Reid dives into what it will take to protect the tremendous natural riches of the territory in a piece for Yukon News.

Southern Yukon is seeing growing pressure to develop roads and extract resources. Proactive planning is needed to keep Yukon's wild areas intact.  Photo: Hilary Cooke/WCS Canada

A single bat box often cannot meet all of its occupants needs.

Goldilocks for bats

Helping bats out with artificial roosts – anything from a modest bat house to a big bat condo – is a great way to help our only flying mammal. But before we pick up a hammer and nails, we have to think more about the whole spectrum of bat needs when it comes to roosts, especially in an era of climate change. Our bat expert, Dr. Cori Lausen, explains what it takes to keep bats comfortable in a recent blog for the Revelator that is based on a webinar she developed for bat box best practices.

It took a special lure to attract this lynx, which had an implanted body temperature monitor researchers needed to recover. The data provided, however, made up for the challenge of recapturing this elusive cat.  Photo: Ally Menzies

High-tech conservation

Our field technologist Jacob Seguin knows a thing or two about technology – and mixing scent lures from traditional recipes (a family secret).  He talks about combining these new and old approaches in a Muddy Boots blog that looks at how WCS is using new remote tracking technology to assess wildlife health and survival threats.

Bison once roamed western North America in huge numbers. Now WCS is helping to spearhead efforts to bring them back. Photo: American Bison Society

Bison on the edge

The challenge of bringing back an ecosystem-shaping species to all parts of its former range will be a key theme at this year’s American Bison Society Conference. The conference is taking place in New Mexico, a place not widely recognized as buffalo country, but the southern edge of the species’ former range. Perspectives will range from those of First Nations with deep cultural ties to bison to women with creative conservation approaches as the conference explores ways to restore this enduring symbol of the western landscape. The conference keynote speaker is Alberta author, artist and bison advocate Wes Olson, creator of the beautifully illustrated Portraits of the Bison and A Field Guide to Plains Bison.

Field Notes

An occasional feature looking at how WCS Canada scientists go about their research

WCS Canada's intrepid Arctic crew heads out to deploy an underwater acoustic recorder. Photo: W. Halliday/WCS Canada

Life on the ice – and in the office

By William Halliday, Associate Conservation Scientist

In the Arctic, our field season is short, lasting from mid-July to early September when the ice is broken, as well as for a couple of weeks during the winter when our team is out on the solid ice. For any one of our researchers, this amounts to a handful of days on a boat in the summer and a couple of days on the ice in the winter. The rest of our “field time” is spent preparing or cleaning up our field gear at the Aurora Research Institute in Inuvik, traveling to remote communities such as Sachs Harbour or Ulukhaktok, or even more remote locations like Viscount Melville Sound, and waiting on the weather to let us get out into the field.

But what about the other 11 months of the year? That time is mostly spent at a desk working on a computer. The acoustic data that we collect actually takes a very large amount of computer time to analyze. The data that we just recovered from the field could be up to a full year of audio recordings, which have to be processed in multiple ways, including measuring how loud the underwater environment is, counting marine mammal and fish calls using both automated detectors and by manually listening to the data, and also cross-correlating the audio data with ship tracking data to find signals from ships and measure how loud these ships are. It could take two months of full-time work on a computer for one person to complete all of these tasks for a single one-year recording. And we aren’t just collecting a single recorder each year! This year, for example, we should have six of these full-year recordings, plus three one-month recordings.

Working with audio data isn’t all that our researchers are doing. We are also building acoustic models to estimate underwater noise from ships based on ship tracking data. And we collaborate with other researchers in the Arctic to examine underwater noise from their acoustic recorders that have been deployed at other locations in the region. We also have a separate research program focused on analyzing the diet of seals in the western Arctic, which involves coordinating with local hunters to collect samples from seals that they have harvested and arranging for a lab to analyze stomach contents and then managing and conducting statistical analyses of the data.

Then of course, our team is also involved in communicating our research to our partners in the Inuvialuit Settlement Region, to government agencies, at conferences, and through social media.

While it is not all fun fieldwork in very cool frozen landscapes, our work is very satisfying. Gathering the data is an extremely important step, but so is all of the computer processing and analysis. Without it, we wouldn’t be able to provide important information on how climate change and shipping are impacting the important species that we study in the Arctic.

At WCS Canada, we stand for wildlife and are in the field every day working to save wildlife and wild places. You can support our work by donating securely through CanadaHelps.org.