Innovation Anthology #313:
Saving woodland caribou in Alberta depends on three factors.
According to Dr. Rick Schneider of the Integrated Landscape Management Program at the University of Alberta, this means curtailing industrial activity, reclaiming seismic lines and roads, and culling wolves.
But the costs are high. So with the help of computer modeling, Dr. Schneider has developed what he calls a “triage approach” to help people decide which herds to save.
DR. RICK SCHNEIDER: There are some that are doing not so bad, some that are almost on the edge of extinction right now. So ranking herds on a variety of factors, beyond just where their trends are and how big their populations are, there are a number of other factors to take into account. And then there are costs. Some are very expensive, the ones that sit right atop the oil sands are literally tens of billions of dollars of opportunity costs lost there, whereas other entire ranges really have not much oil or gas value at all, could be protected for next to no cost to the crown. So by weighing all these factors you can provide a ranking of the herds. Which one would be the first herd you’d pick if you could only do one?
Without the triage approach, Dr. Schneider believes we’ll lose all the caribou herds.
FOR INNOVATION ANTHOLOGY
I’M CHERYL CROUCHER
Guest
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Sponsor
NSERC Industrial Research Chair in Integrated Landscape Management
The Integrated Landscape Management Chair is developing a toolkit for ecologically informed land use planning. At the heart of this toolkit is a suite of models capable of integrating multiple land use activities over large areas and long time scales to explore the future impacts of todays land use decisions. The models do this by linking human actions to indicators of ecological, economic, and social condition. They are constrained by their ability to adequately represent the dynamics of complex systems, and our current research emphasis aims to reduce the uncertainties over the impacts of invasive organisms on species at risk in Canadas boreal forest.
The ILM Chair is an initiative of the Department of Biological Sciences at the University of Alberta, with sponsors and collaborators in academia, government, and the private sector.
Program Date: 2010-05-11