This webinar series, hosted by the Indigenous Knowledge Circle of the National Boreal Caribou Knowledge Consortium, highlights Indigenous-led work to protect and restore caribou and their habitat.

Past webinars include:

• Jan 2021 - Collaboration, Range Planning and the Porcupine Caribou Herd
• May 2021 - How can range planning for caribou advance reconciliation?
• Mar 2022 - Community-led Planning for Caribou: Changing How We Do Conservation

• Jan 2023 - Caribou Conservation, Treaty Rights, and Guardians in Alberta's Oil Sands

• Nov 2023 - Tâdzié-Sagow Atihk Stewardship Plan - Indigenous Knowledge to Recover Caribou

• May 2024 - Bridging the gap: Revitalizing Tłı̨chǫ Nàowoò (Way of Life) through Ekwǫ̀ (caribou) and Environmental Stewardship

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.

This project considered the role of traditional knowledge in wildlife health monitoring through a 12-year period of research with elders and harvesters.

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 project looked at local knowledge of the Porcupine Caribou Herd, collected by the Arctic Borderlands Ecological Knowledge Co-op (ABEKC). While local observations indicated that the herd was healthy during 2000-2007, quantitative estimates for the same period predicted a decline. When the herd was surveyed in 2010, results indicated that the herd had indeed grown. The study concluded that community-based interviews provided a valid, unique information source to better understand caribou ecology and express community perceptions of overall herd status and could provide a valuable contribution to management decision making.

This Master's project documented an evaluation of the spatial utility of the Arctic Borderlands Ecological Knowledge Co-op database and the many steps that are involved in the collection, storage, and organization of the Co-op’s data. It provided an excellent opportunity to explore the problem of depicting complex qualitative information on northern landscape change in an intelligible GIS format. Initial attempts to develop the database in spatial format were critically evaluated and recommendations were provided in order to explore whether the data gathering and subsequent mapping process can be improved, whether more useful information can be obtained from the data, and to ensure the proper handling of the data in future years.