Caribou ‘story map’ shows story of recovery, enlargement in Southern Lakes herds

Twenty-five years ago, Lars Jessup would have had to follow gloomy radio signals from an airplane, only to find out where a caribou he monitors had roamed.

Today, interjection to new GPS collars, he can download that information daily, to his phone.

Now, Jessup, Environment Yukon’s Southern Lakes informal biologist, says his dialect has put that information to use in building a new set of interactive online tracking tools they’re job a “story map.” The interactive map tells a story of a herds’ indeterminate recovery, and a efforts of researchers to collect new information on their health and movements.

“It’s an bid from my bend and a territory to share some of a unequivocally engaging work we’re doing on a Southern Lakes caribou,” he said.

The Southern Lakes caribou embody 4 woodland herds that live nearby a lakes that cluster around a Yukon-B.C. border, including Lake Laberge, Atlin Lake, and Teslin Lake.

These caribou have been underneath a liberation devise given 1993, when a race of some herds fell to only a few hundred animals amid augmenting tellurian allotment in a area.

That plan, whose iconic trademark is seen on many bumpers in a region, criminialized sport a caribou, and 6 First Nations in a area willingly dangling their harvest. Since then, a numbers have rebounded.

The map shows some-more than only a southern caribou. It includes guess ranges for all of a territory’s caribou herds, including a roving barren-ground herds of a North.

But it’s in Jessup’s possess backyard where a use of a new GPS record has yielded a biggest surprises.

“The additional thing about collars is they give we all of a good information … about caribou and how they use a landscape,” he said. “We’re training where they winter, where they rut, [and] how they get … between them.” 

That’s generally critical for a Carcross herd, that clusters on land between a bustling Klondike and Alaska highways south of Whitehorse.

“So, where do they cranky highways? How do subdivisions or sand pits or other tellurian growth impact their use of a land?” asked Jessup.

“I’m anticipating that people find this interesting, though also, this is an event for people to see only how a caribou … are regulating a landscape in propinquity to their possess activities,” he said.

The interactive website also includes information on how and where wildlife officers have collared a caribou — accompanied by mugshots of a tagged animals.

Jessup says a GPS collars concede a dialect to use a some-more accurate “mark-resight” process of counting a herds, that uses a ratio between collared and uncollared caribou in an area to guess a distance of a population.

In a box of a Ibex herd, that was GPS collared for a initial time only final year, a information is already display enlivening results.

The herd, that roams a land southwest of Whitehorse, has seen a numbers rebound, and has stretched a operation west of Kusawa Lake and serve into northern B.C.

“We have a lot of longtime Yukoners who have knowledge with that area who have never seen caribou there before,” he said.

Jessup says a dialect should have updated race estimates for a Southern Lakes caribou — a initial in some-more than 10 years — someday this year.

That will be followed by some-more minute stating on a herds’ movements, quite around areas of tellurian settlement, in a few years’ time.

Article source: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/southern-lakes-caribou-story-map-1.5415245?cmp=rss