About The Rangifer Anatomy Project:

Healthy caribou and reindeer (Rangifer tarandus spp.) are vital to communities and indigenous cultures throughout the Arctic. Many northerners continue to depend on caribou and reindeer for food and as a focus for cultural and economic activities. Wild caribou and reindeer are also keystone species in the circumpolar north and are critical for the maintenance of healthy northern ecosystems.

The Rangifer Anatomy Project (RAP) grew out of a need for better resources to enhance Rangifer health monitoring, to promote responsible hunting, and to facilitate knowledge exchange across generations among Rangifer users including northern community members, wildlife managers, scientists, and educators. RAP was initiated at the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine, University of Calgary in December 2007 and has since grown into a much larger collaboration in the Rangifer world.

Resources:

• The Rangifer Anatomy Project webpage
• Tlicho terms for caribou anatomy
• Body Mass and Composition Indices for Female Barren-Ground Caribou
• The musculoskeletal anatomy of the reindeer (Rangifer tarandus): fore-and hindlimb
• Traditional nutritional food factsheet series: caribou factsheet
• Slides of caribou anatomy images
• Poster: tools and collaborative approaches to bridging the communication gap between northern communities and scientists about caribou anatomy and health
• Facebook page: Sahtu Vets – “One Health”

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" (this page) 
•  Community-based Muskox and Caribou Health Monitoring / Community Based Wildlife Health Surveillance Program,
• NSERC PromoScience 

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