The fate of woodland caribou rest
on a varied, immediate and intense response to reduce predation rates,
according to a University of Alberta-led comprehensive review of population
recovery measures.
"This is a conservation
emergency," said Rob Serrouya, director of the Caribou Monitoring Unit of
the U of A-affiliated Alberta Biodiversity Monitoring Institute and lead author
on the study. "Four herds in B.C. and Alberta have gone extinct over the
last 25 years and there are less than 3,000 woodland caribou in the study area
in the two provinces."
With the clock ticking, Serrouya's
team analyzed results from 25 years of attempts to manage caribou populations
in an area covering more than 90,000 square kilometres in the southern portion
of the Canadian Rocky mountains. The population management
treatments studied were translocation, wolf reduction, moose reduction and
maternity penning, which involves protecting caribou and their newborns during
labour and for a month after birth.
What the group found was—save for
the translocation, which Serrouya said was doomed to fail as it happened in an
area where there was no predator reduction—removing wolves, moose and using
maternity pens each worked. However, the researchers also found that if at
least two of the treatments were tried in combination, population growth of the
caribou was increased even more so.
The most dramatic population
surge occurred In the Klines-Za population, north of Prince George, BC, where
maternal penning and wolf removal strategies were used. In three years, the herd
nearly doubled, from 36 to more than 67.
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