Boreal caribou movement in relation to forage availability and habitat structure within regenerating burns

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Boreal caribou are of great cultural importance in the Northwest Territories (NWT), and across Canada. Listed as "threatened" under the Species at Risk Act, their populations are considered vulnerable to increases in fire activity that are taking place at northern latitudes due to global warming. This concern follows from the long-established view that caribou make limited use of burned areas until the biomass of terrestrial lichens, a vital food resource, has recovered. This recovery may take 40 years or longer. However, caribou in the NWT have been observed to use some very large recent burns in summer. This raises several questions: Why are caribou using these early post-fire habitats? Will they stop using them? If so, when and why? This proposal seeks to answer those questions by integrating the partner's extensive, high resolution caribou location data with coextensive vegetation plot data assembled by the applicants and collaborators, by means of the applicant's expertise in vegetation dynamics modelling and the statistical analysis of caribou movement data. The expected outcome is a mechanistic understanding of caribou behavioural responses to the changes in the structure and composition of vegetation communities that take place over the first decades after fire. The results will be integrated in ecological forecasting tools so as to enable other researchers to explore caribou population responses to changing fire regime and vegetation in the NWT, as part of comprehensive modelling studies emerging for the NWT and beyond.