Application of remote sensing technologies to assess responses of a boreal keystone species to variability in food and structural cover

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Remote sensing technologies have only recently become available at a sufficiently fine scale and cost-efficient pricing to relate variation in the biotic environment to animal ecology and population dynamics. The requested infrastructure (unmanned aerial vehicle (i.e., drone), LiDAR, RGB and multispectral cameras) is needed to support D. Murray (TrentU) and S. Boutin (UAlberta) in their long-term research on snowshoe hares and boreal ecosystem dynamics at Kluane Lake, Yukon. Hares exhibit dramatic 10-year population cycles that reverberate through the boreal forest ecosystem. Hares are importantly influenced by shrubs and trees, which offer food and structural cover from predation; spatio-temporal variation in these resources likely impacts hare population ecology and boreal ecosystem dynamics. Multispectral imagery will be used to document spectral properties of plants, to infer species-specific phenology, productivity, and growth. Combined LiDAR and RGB imagery will produce full colour, three-dimensional point clouds for robust assessment of vegetation structure (i.e., cover). Our UAV is designed for challenging industrial applications and will be flown over our 6 permanent hare study areas (36 ha each), year-round and at a high frequency (~20X flights per year), to provide fine-scale inter-annual and seasonal assessment of food/cover resources, including during winter when snowcover affects resource availability. This intensity of remote sensing sampling is unprecedented in ecology and is only achievable by permanently housing the equipment at our remote Yukon field station. Remote sensing surveys will be conducted in tandem with ongoing and intensive research involving GPS telemetry and accelerometry of hares and their main predators (Canada lynx), to reveal how dynamic changes in hare food/cover affect shifts in hare behaviour and movements. Further, the proposed infrastructure will serve to elucidate whether patterns of hare risk avoidance and mortality conform to spatial or temporal shifts in food/cover. Because instrumented lynx overlap spatially with hares on our study areas, the equipment will provide unprecedented insight into how variation in forest structure and phenology can trickle up' to shape predator behaviour, habitat selection and hunting strategy. Over a longer term, this research will also help elucidate whether climate change is altering the structure and function of plant resources in the boreal forest, and whether such variation contributes to ecosystem-level changes like attenuation of cyclic dynamics in herbivores and their predators. The infrastructure will serve to train high quality personnel (HQP) in instrument operation and product analysis, which will dramatically improve their marketability and employment trajectory.