With many boreal caribou population ranges across Canada in non-self sustaining condition, habitat restoration has become an increasing imperative for recovery of this species at risk. With decades required to return disturbed areas to mature forest conditions required by caribou, this presents a significant challenge. The extent of habitat loss that is ongoing in large parts of the species' distribution is exacerbated by a legacy of inadequate attention to reclamation following development and associated linear features. The Recovery Strategy for boreal caribou under the federal Species At Risk Act, released in 2012, provides a framework for setting restoration priorities for boreal caribou, based on a well-established relationship between habitat disturbance and population condition. The reference state for boreal caribou habitat restoration efforts is defined as the relative amount of "undisturbed habitat" as a key part of Recovery Strategy's critical habitat definition, relative to the recovery goal of achieving self-sustaining local populations in all boreal caribou ranges throughout their current distribution in Canada, to the extent possible. This paper discusses and defines boreal caribou habitat restoration in the context of both national recovery efforts for this species at risk and insights from caribou ecology and the rapidly advancing field of ecological restoration.
The practice of ecological restoration tends to be dominated by local-scale efforts, yet effective restoration for boreal caribou will require explicit linkages between site-specific restoration actions and corresponding range-level effectiveness evaluations. Site-scale efforts directed towards restoring features (e.g., wellpads, cutblocks, linear features, etc.) are necessary to set a course for success, where work is defined on the basis of local (e.g., eco-site) conditions to establish the best potential areas, likely trajectories, and the end points of active efforts. And while it would be appropriate to credit restoration efforts in some fashion for work that has achieved interim success (i.e., establishment on a trajectory), this does not itself indicate that sufficient restoration has occurred to trigger permitting of disturbance elsewhere in a population range if it has not achieved self-sustaining status. Where required, habitat restoration at the range scale should prioritize areas for restoration effort, undertake strategic coordination of restoration activities, build large blocks of restored features with high connectivity, and monitor progress of range-scale restoration. Range plans, mandated by the Recovery Strategy, will provide a useful platform for guiding restoration efforts at appropriate scales and monitoring the success of all recovery efforts. Locally variable conditions and a lack of a true ecological threshold makes it necessary to adopt a cautious approach with deploying the management threshold of 65% "undisturbed habitat" as a restoration target, and heightens the importance of monitoring of population trends to test whether local populations are responding positively to restoration efforts. A framework offered in this paper establishes criteria for measuring progress toward the restoration goal and objectives. Each criterion is designed to be implemented at either the feature or range scales, all of which should be considered in tandem.