Scaling Up the Role of Predation in Caribou Declines in West-Central Alberta (Redwillow, Narraway, Redrock Prairie Creek, A la Pêche and Little Smoky Ranges)

Authors
Christina Semeniuk
Byron Weckworth
Marco Musiani
Mark Hebblewhite
Resource Date:
2013
Page Length
93

Anthropogenic disturbances contribute to the way animals perceive and respond to their environment. These multiple disturbances can additionally act in non-independent ways to shape an animal’s landscape of fear, making it challenging to isolate their effects for effective and targeted management. Boreal woodland caribou (Rangifer tarandus caribou) populations across Canada are threatened, in part, by intense industrial development that has introduced multiple features on the landscape resulting in increased pressure that has effects similar to predation.
Using a spatially explicit behavioral agent-based model (ABM), we conducted a sensitivity analysis with different industry-driven, landscape-of-fear scenarios to test how caribou in west central Alberta differentially respond to industrial features (linear features, forest cutblocks, wellsites) and their attributes such as presence, density, harvest age, and wellsite activity status.
The ABM encapsulates predation risk, heterogeneous resource distribution, and species-specific energetic requirements, to recreate the behavioral mechanisms driving habitat selection. To identify industry feature(s) and their attributes with greatest relative influence on caribou habitat use and spatial distribution, simulated caribou movement patterns were compared with those of actual caribou using GPS-telemetry data from thirteen caribou radio-collars deployed in winter 2004. Results revealed caribou have incorporated forestry- and oil and gas features into their
landscape of fear that affect their spatial and energetic responses. The presence of roads, pipelines and seismic lines, and, to a minor extent, high-density cutblocks and active wellsites, all contributed to explaining caribou responses. Our findings also indicated that both oil and gas and forestry produced cumulative effects, as they jointly impacted caribou spatial distributions and energetic reserves. There was no clear substitution effect between features. We demonstrate that behavior-based ABMs can be applied to assessing and isolating non-consumptive impacts of
cumulative effects, in support of critical habitat planning.