caribou

Canada is home to the largest boreal forest in the world, a vast expanse of wilderness rich in biodiversity that stretches from coast to coast.But a major new study examining nearly a half century of logging in Ontario and Quebec warns that clear-cutting has left forests in the provinces severely depleted — and puts woodland caribou at risk.The peer-reviewed research, published in the academic journal Land, found that logging practices between 1976 and 2020 have resulted in the loss of more than 14 million hectares of…

Before starting your day — deciding on an activity or how to dress for the elements — you might do the same thing Michael Dietze does."I pick up my phone and check the weather forecast at least once or twice a day to see what's likely to come," he said. Dietze dedicates his time working on the type of forecasting that's commonplace for the weather, but to help handle other environmental challenges, as a professor leading the Ecological Forecasting Laboratory at Boston University.Traditionally, environmental management…

A new $24 million matchmaking program is aiming to help rebuild caribou populations in Jasper National Park that are too small to recover on their own.  The federal government announced Tuesday that its previously announced proposal to carry out a first-of-its-kind caribou conservation breeding program is going ahead. "We've determined through that work over the last few years that using conservation breeding is the only tool available to Parks Canada and Jasper National Park to be able to recover these small herds," said…

When something's messing with your insides and you feel like you're going to hurl, the last thing you probably want to do is eat.Deer, caribou, and other ungulates (hoofed animals) experience a similar problem when infected by non-deadly parasites. It utterly sucks for them, but it turns out infections that put them off their food have a wider benefit for the ecosystem.  "Parasites are well known for their negative impacts on the physiology and behavior of individual hosts and host populations, but these effects are…