Wildlife cameras tell story

February 07, 2024

(All photos credit: the Applied Conservation Macroecology (ACME) Lab)

By Anne MacLaurin

Petroleum exploration and extraction, forest harvesting, and roads are rapidly changing the Western Canadian landscape. This type of landscape development is threatening biodiversity and changing the behaviour of wildlife. Understanding how wildlife species respond to this industrial development is challenging and does not always give clear answers say researchers in a new paper published in Science of the Total Environment.

Lead author, UVic postdoctoral fellow Dr. Andrew Barnas and the Applied Conservation Macroecology (ACME) Lab used an unprecedented dataset of remote wildlife cameras collected over 13 years from 9 different study areas. They looked at the responses of 11 mammal species to industrial development – including black bears, caribou, cougars, coyotes, elk, grizzly bears, lynx, moose, mule deer, white tailed deer, and wolves.

“We found that different species respond to disturbances in different ways; some species, such as, caribou are seriously impacted by habitat loss, while others, such as, coyotes and white-tailed deer thrive in these new landscapes," says Barnas.

Barnas and co-authors, including members of Whitefish Lake First Nation and researchers from the University of British Columbia, University of Alberta, Wilfrid Laurier University, and the government of Alberta, found wildlife respond to disturbance in their immediate area but also rely on the “bigger picture” of disturbance levels throughout the entire landscape. According to Barnas, what makes understanding wildlife responses difficult, is that sometimes the same species can respond in different ways, depending on where and how you look. 

“As conservation biologists, we want to identify general trends of wildlife responses to disturbances, so we can better inform future management practices,” says Barnas. 

Fundamentally, this means we must consider how local disturbance fits into its larger environment, as this can have big impacts on wildlife living there, which has implications for future industry plans when considering when and where to develop.

This novel research reveals hidden complexities in understanding how wildlife copes with industrial development—but also reveals a whole new approach to investigating these processes—one that will involve networks of universities, governments, and First Nations across North America. 

“Large synthetic approaches to understanding wildlife conservation issues, those that involve multiple cooperating agencies, are the future of wildlife research,” says Barnas. “As more and more cameras get put out onto the landscape each year, this only strengthens our insights in wildlife biology. But this requires teamwork and collaboration.”