Innovation and interdisciplinary research to understand the causes and mitigate consequences of environmental change in the Boreal Plains

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The Boreal Plains of western Canada is at the front of perhaps the most extensive restructuring of a terrestrial ecosystem in North America. Understanding and managing for this transition is made difficult because of poorly understood and complex interdependencies between the ecological and socioecological sub-systems of the boreal forest. Progress cannot be achieved with discipline-specific or single-species based approaches alone. We bring together a multi-sectoral partnership of Indigenous groups; the Saskatchewan, Alberta, and federal governments; an NGO; engaged industrial partners both private and public; and a diverse team of academics. Our goal is to advance an innovative and interdisciplinary program to make a demonstrable impact on what we believe are the most significant knowledge gaps currently impeding our ability to flatten the pace of environmental change in the Boreal Plains and buffer its impacts. We arrange our objectives around a progressive training plan and seven research milestones drawing on a wide disciplinary spectrum (technology, ecology, socioecology) to help us predict and react more effectively to change. The latter includes a poorly understood, gradual shift in the food web from interacting landscape × climate change, a symptom of which is the invasion of white-tailed deer northward with associated declines in populations of moose and boreal caribou. Impacts on these species may come from more abundant predators supported by deer but also transmission of emergent diseases like chronic wasting disease. Our innovative and inclusive project is directed at understanding and mitigating such existential threats to northern food systems at the basis of culture and community well-being; while our Indigenous-STEM focused training plan aims to effect lasting change within the existing academic, industrial, and bureaucratic structures that currently dominate stewardship of Canada's natural resources. Ultimately, our proposal is about providing the tools, knowledge, practical options, and inclusive capacity to conserve the changing Boreal Plains ecosystem while safeguarding core socioecological needs and values.