Blog: A New Approach to Habitat Recovery Could Help Threatened Woodland Caribou

Authors
Alberta Biodiversity Monitoring Institute
Resource Date:
2017

How do we decide when habitat of the threatened woodland caribou has been restored after human disturbance? A new study, led by Melanie Dickie of the ABMI’s Caribou Monitoring Unit (CMU) and published in the journal Ecosphere, suggests it’s when plants grow tall enough to block predatory wolves from taking the ‘highways’—seismic lines—they use to get around otherwise dense forest. The research should help prioritize areas for restoration, stretching precious dollars further in the race for caribou conservation.

The team found that wolves moved two to three times faster and farther on open cutlines. That changed when re-growing plants reached a height of 50 cm, or just under two feet. Once the plants reached this height, wolf speed dropped dramatically, almost to the levels found in undisturbed forest, and any further increases in vegetation height had only a small additional slowing effect on wolves. 

The upshot is that from a caribou’s perspective, seismic lines might be considered effectively ‘restored’—that is, the additional risk associated with them might be considered negligible—once vegetation reaches 50 cm in height. That’s a big change from the ‘visible from space’ definition, which doesn’t consider the unique ecology of wolves and caribou.