About NSERC PromoScience funding program

NSERC's PromoScience Program offers financial support for organizations working with young Canadians to promote an understanding of science and engineering (including mathematics and technology). PromoScience supports hands-on learning experiences for young Canadians in elementary school and high school (including the equivalent first year of college in Quebec) as well as for their educators.

Kutz Research group outputs under the "NSERC PromoScience"

• Project: Engaging Inuit Youth in Science and Developing Community Expertise in Wildlife Health (2017 - 2024)  

KUTZ Research group objective:

We are an interdisciplinary group with the underlying goal of understanding the health of free-living wildlife and applying that knowledge for the purposes of sustainable subsistence use and conservation of healthy ecosystems. The main body of our work focuses on understanding the impacts of environmental perturbations (e.g., climate change and habitat disturbance) on animal health. We engage directly with subsistence hunters and northern communities to identify emerging concerns and to develop and implement practical and effective disease surveillance methodologies. We use field, laboratory, and captive animal studies together with local knowledge and observations to document parasite biodiversity, understand disease dynamics, and develop empirically-based models to predict transmission dynamics under changing environmental conditions. 

Core to all of our activities is collaboration starting with the individual subsistence hunter and communities through to the wildlife management and conservation agencies. We believe strongly in knowledge translation and return to the community and all of our activities include components of community outreach.

The Kutz Research group is involved in a few programs, including:

• The Rangifer Anatomy Project: Developing Tools for Community and Scientific Approaches to Caribou Structure and Function
•  Community-based Muskox and Caribou Health Monitoring / Community Based Wildlife Health Surveillance Program,
• NSERC PromoScience (this page)

Kutz Research Group is also on social media. Regular posts are made on the Facebook page.

Grounded in an Indigenous methodological framework and using dendroecology as a scientific assessment tool in combination with oral history analysis, this thesis project assessed changes to caribou movement patterns in the traditional territory of Lutsel K’e Dene First Nation (LKDFN), Northwest Territories, Canada. 

Used Aboriginal traditional knowledge and science to identify several seasonal range attributes that were examined for changes from 1996 through 2013 (decreasing population abundance of the Bathurst caribou herd). Seasonal range attributes were calculated from female collared caribou and climate data were also analyzed for temporal trends that may be correlated with changes in seasonal ranges.