Grant: Collaborative Research and Development Grants

Forest-dwelling caribou have experienced declining abundance and range retraction throughout large parts of the boreal zone in Ontario. Anthropogenic landscape disturbances has been suggested as the primary cause of declining caribou in Ontario, mirroring patterns seen in other parts of the country. Future economic development in northern Ontario is likely to involve roads, forestry, mining, and hydro development, all of which could potentially influence persistence of woodland caribou, through habitat alteration. We propose to test the effects of forest successional stage, source of forest disturbance, road density, and densities of predators and other herbivores on the rate of energy gain, predation risk, movement rate, patterns of habitat association, and vital rates for woodland caribou equipped with GPS radio-collars in two large (22,500 km2) landscapes in northern Ontario. The proposed field study has the following specific objectives: (1) use GPS radio-telemetry data for 100 woodland caribou and 24 wolves to determine patterns of movement, home range use, predation risk, survival, and offspring recruitment, (2) develop mechanistic movement models for woodland caribou and wolves on the basis of energy gain and predation risk, (3) use mechanistic movement models from ½ the radio-telemetry data to predict patterns of home range use, habitat selection, and predation risk and test those predictions against field observations from the other ½ of the data, (4) test the effects of forest stand composition, forest source of origin (fire vs harvesting), food plant availability, road density, herbivore density, and carnivore density on caribou survival and offspring recruitment, (5) link the movement, energy-gain, predation risk, and vital rates sub-models with a spatially-explicit population viability model for woodland caribou, and (6) use the PVA model to predict the long-term effect of forest disturbance from natural and anthropogenic causes on the probability of population persistence by woodland caribou and the potential caribou response to alternative management policies available to the government of Ontario.