The Cape Churchill caribou herd, part of the Eastern Migratory caribou population, resides along the western coast of Hudson Bay and has been largely unstudied. However, they are locally important to hunters and visiting tourists, as well as an ecological keystone species as a grazer and prey source. As a product of the 2020 Beyond Borders Caribou Workshop, we developed a collaborative team of academic researchers, Parks Canada staff, and Manitoba Métis Federation staff. Our on-going efforts have focused on developing and fortifying relationships and identifying common goals centered around caribou conservation and the greater ecosystem. The summer range of the Cape Churchill herd is almost completely protected by Wapusk National Park, however the winter range is largely unprotected, existing outside of the park boundaries. The development of a proposed Indigenous Protected Conservation Area (IPCA), led by the Manitoba Métis Federation is a priority goal of our group, with caribou being its focal species. Our objectives are to: (1) monitor the Cape Churchill herd annually to estimate population composition and long-term trends, (2) develop and monitor a grid of n=97 trail cameras on summer range to characterize caribou occurrences, group size, arrival and departure dates to and from seasonal ranges, (3) continue our 23 years of intensive habitat monitoring, (4) monitor the impacts of fire on the winter range using remote sensing, (5) study wolf occurrences in relation to caribou on summer range, (6) incorporate local and traditional knowledge, and (7) engage local and Indigenous youth and elders.

This project is about what Danny Beaulieu learned about the caribou cycle over the past one hundred and ten years or so, talking to Denesųłıné elders in Fort Resolution, Łutselk’e, and Yellowknife. He mostly learned from his grandmother, his grandparents, and his parents.

The objective of this study was to examine food and nutrition security in relation to wildlife population and management status across Inuit Nunangat (the Inuit homeland, consisting of four regions across the Canadian Arctic). Specifically,  it: (1) describes the importance of caribou to the nutrition security of contemporary Inuit, by relating caribou consumption to nutrient intakes and (2) examines the management status of northern caribou herds by compiling population status trends and identifying restrictions to caribou harvest (i.e., harvest quotas or moratoria).

This project compared the attitudes and perceptions toward caribou (Rangifer tarandus) management practices held by users and managers of the Western Arctic Herd (WAH) in Alaska and the Beverly and Qamanirjuaq herds (BQH) in Canada.

This project sought to document Inuit knowledge as it relates to caribou movements, hunting, habitat, the importance of caribou for community diets, livelihoods and cultural practices.

This study examined data on the status of three northern mammal species – caribou/reindeer, Pacific walrus, and polar bear—during two decades of the ongoing Arctic warming. The emerging record may be best approached as a series of local human-animal disequilibria interpreted from different angles by population biologists, indigenous peoples, and anthropologists, rather than a top-down climate-induced ‘crash.’ Such new understanding implies the varying speed of change in the physical, animal, and human domains, which was not factored in the earlier models of climate–animal–people’s interactions.

This PhD project use multiple disciplinary traditions to develop comprehensive and united representations of caribou variation through an exploration of population genetics, phylogenetics, traditional knowledge, language, and visual approaches in the Sahtú region of the Northwest Territories, Canada.