Since 2009, Dr. Glenn Sutherland has worked with Environment Canada and a national team of scientists and science advisors to assess the condition of critical habitat for over 57 boreal caribou populations in six provinces and two territories to inform Environment Canada's Recovery Strategy for this threatened ecotype. The goals of the assessment are: (1) to evaluate quantitatively the probability that each local population can remain self-sustaining on its present range, and (2) to determine ecologically relevant management thresholds for disturbance on these ranges that may be used to guide policy on the types, amounts, and distribution of future industrial disturbances that have a high likelihood of meeting acceptability criteria for achieving the recovery goal.

Services: Dr. Sutherland has worked with Environment Canada staff and research scientists to design a national approach to spatially modelling habitat and disturbance dynamics in the boreal forest for assessing the cumulative effects of landbase industrial activity on boreal caribou range condition through time. Using spatial data for ecological attributes defining different habitat qualities, and recently mapped disturbances for focal ranges area, Dr. Sutherland has used spatial simulations to combined alternative development scenarios with predicted ecological dynamics to estimate the potential effects of different future conditions on caribou range values. These simulations are combined with a habitat-based PVA methodology to calculate the effects of changing range and population conditions on the probability that herds will remain viable through time. The analysis results for both range condition and population condition are combined in a BBN framework to assess the likelihood that each herd can remain self-sustaining now and in the future.

Outcomes: The range-level results are being used by government and academic scientists to develop range-specific thresholds for disturbance that meet the overall recovery goal for this caribou ecotype. This is an on-going project with final results due in March 2011.