(June 02, 2007) Following fishers, a member of the weasel family, is full of pitfalls. Conservation biologists generally tell how many fishers are in an area by using tracking boxes, a non-invasive device that will record a fisher's tracks. Unfortunately, if there were several fisher tracks in the same area, it was always impossible to tell whether one or many fishers actually left them. That was until Dr. Justina Ray, the director of the Wildlife Conservation Society, Canada, and colleagues, were sitting aroun...

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(June 01, 2007) A workshop organized by WCS Canada the Canadian Boreal Initiative and was held February 28 and March 1, 2006 at the University of Ottawa with habitat needs of woodland caribou as the central focus.  The goal of the gathering was to explore how much consensus there is among caribou scientists about what is and what is not caribou habitat, and on parameters or thresholds for maintaining sufficient woodland caribou habitat in the face of large-scale anthropogenic disturbances.  Presently,...

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(June 01, 2007) Too small, too narrow - this is the problem facing Nahanni National Park Reserve in the Northwest Territories. Created in 1972 to protect the spectacular falls and canyons of the famed South Nahanni River, the park is only 8 km wide in some sections. Dr. John Weaver, a WCS conservation biologist who has studied wildlife in the Yellowstone-to-Yukon region for more that 3 decades, has now completed a 4-year study of grizzly bears, Dall's sheep, and woodland caribou throughout the Greater Nahanni E...

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(June 01, 2007) WCS Canada has completed mapping the Human Footprint of the Northern Appalachian / Acadian Ecoregion - a quantitative assessment of the continuum of human influence on the lands surface. The Human Footprint methodology developed by WCS and CIESEN scientists has been tailored to this forested ecoregion by 1) increasing the resolution of analysis to 90m, 2) using regional spatial data and 3) tailoring the assessment of human impacts to the region. This analysis reveals that 16% of the ecoregion st...

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