Habitat loss is – by far – the most common reason species become at risk of extinction. There are many ways to combat this threat, including protecting key areas from human activities, and restoring habitat that has been removed or otherwise damaged.

Habitat restoration must play a large role in recovery efforts for boreal caribou. Many populations are declining where human activities like forest harvesting, agriculture, settlement, oil sands and roads have damaged or destroyed their habitat. Boreal caribou are currently listed as Threatened under the federal Species At Risk Act and under most provincial and territorial species at risk legislation where this animal resides.

A discussion paper on this topic by WCS Canada’s President, Justina Ray, was commissioned by Environment Canada as federal recovery efforts grapple with the challenge of habitat restoration. The paper was posted earlier this month on Environment Canada’s website:

Dr. Ray's paper discuses and defines boreal caribou habitat restoration in the context of both national recovery efforts and insights from the rapidly advancing field of ecological restoration, and proposes criteria for what constitutes restored habitat. Currently, there is no consensus on the definition of “restored” habitat, despite a commitment by countries at the 2010 meeting of the Convention on Biological Diversity to restore 15% of degraded ecosystems by 2020.

Boreal caribou are a prime example of the difficulty of bringing back habitat that has been lost; decades are needed to restore mature forest habitats, and the extent of habitat loss that has already occurred adds a daunting dimension to the task. On top of these issues, conservation efforts are struggling against a legacy of inadequate attention to reclamation thus far.

A key conclusion of the paper is that effective restoration for boreal caribou will require site-based restoration activities to be linked with range-scale land use planning and monitoring. It will be exceedingly difficult to recover boreal caribou populations once they are in decline and disturbance levels are high. Restoring ecosystems is typically a highly expensive process that requires substantially more effort than prevention of ecological damage in the first place.

To read the paper in its entirety: click here.