CANMORE – If you come across researchers dressed in yellow University of Alberta shirts out and about on the trails around Canmore this summer, consider taking a few minutes to stop and answer questions about wildlife and recreation.
The survey, which is part of a bigger project known as the Canmore Corridor Project that includes analyses of GPS collars on wildlife and remote camera data, is currently underway to look at the impact of trail-based recreation on wary wildlife in Canmore.
“Those are species that usually avoid humans, such as bears, cougars, wolves, and lynx,” said Chloé Nicol, who is based in Canmore for the summer and doing her masters in behavioural ecology and wildlife management.
The aim of the Canmore Corridor Project is to promote human-wildlife coexistence by providing information and recommendations to help large carnivores move safely through wildlife corridors and core habitats while allowing recreation in the area.
To do that, information about the movement of wildlife from GPS collars and remote cameras, especially grizzly bears and wolves, will be integrated with trail use to better understand how human use affects wildlife.
Specifically, the idea of the survey is to get a better understanding of what attracts people to the trails in Canmore, along with their knowledge of and value for use of the same areas by wildlife.
“People might see us in yellow U of A shirts out on the trails and at trailheads this summer,” said Nicol.
The Bow Valley is an increasingly desirable destination for people to visit, live and recreate.
This is in part due to its proximity to Calgary, where the population has exploded in the past decades, as well as the region’s growing reputation around the world as a popular tourist hotspot.
The Bow Valley has been described as one of the busiest landscapes in North America where grizzly bears continue to exist.
Here, people who love to run, hike, walk dogs and bike, and wildlife, which need secure habitat away from disturbance to feed, rest, reproduce, and move, both concentrate along the valley bottoms.
Officials say this can lead to human-wildlife encounters and displacement of wildlife from important habitat and corridors.
Colleen Cassady St. Clair, a professor in the biological sciences department at the U of A who is supervising the project, said increasing human population and activity in the Canmore area is inhibiting habitat use and movement of shy carnivores, particularly grizzly bears and wolves.
She said one of the concerns is the potential for human-wildlife conflict in the increasingly busy area of the Bow Valley.
“This issue has been attracting interest by concerned individuals for decades with an increasing need for tangible actions, particularly concerning trail-based recreation,” said Cassady St. Clair.
As part of the overall Canmore Corridor Project, Peter Thompson, a postdoctoral fellow at the U of A, is integrating data from the past 10 years from GPS collars worn by grizzly bears and wolves and images from remote cameras in the region.
“Peter is well underway synthesizing the data from the GPS collars and remote cameras and will report on this work in the spring of 2024,” said Cassady St. Clair.
Nicol is assisting Michelle Murphy, a Ph.D. student at the U of A to implement the survey, which has so far garnered about 400 responses. The researchers are intercepting recreationalists at busy trailheads to ask a series of questions.
The goal of the survey, Nicol said, is to determine how people use the trail network in the Canmore area and assess their knowledge of recreational effects on wary species that rely on wildlife corridors.
“We hope to learn the context of recreational activities by both residents and visitors, such as time, place, frequency, and type of activities, and the extent of pro-environmental behaviours they engage in while recreating,” she said.
“We also ask about their relationships to the Canmore area trails, and their willingness to support potential future management actions to facilitate the movement of large carnivores.”
Posters are also displayed at trailhead kiosks and in various venues in Canmore, directing people to take the survey, and social media is being used to promote it. Other interest groups have been contacted via e-mail.
The results of the survey will be used for Murphy’s doctoral dissertation at the U of A as well as for Nicol’s master’s thesis at the Université de Bourgogne Franche-Comté in France.
“I will provide an initial summary of the survey results and Michelle will examine the more subtle relationships among responses,” she said, noting the results will be shared with land managers and the public published in academic journals.
Nicol said she appreciates Canmore residents and visitors who are showing interest in the project and helping with the research.
“We hope to get even more survey responses because that will make our findings more accurate and representative,” she said.
“I hope Canmore’s residents and trail users will see posters at trailheads or in shops or restaurants and take the survey, thereby helping to support human-wildlife coexistence.”
The Bow Valley human-wildlife coexistence task force concluded that at higher densities, human use can reduce wildlife habitat effectiveness by displacing wary carnivores and restricting their ability to move between habitats.
“An increase in human presence and use on the landscape requires increased levels of enforcement and compliance if human-wildlife coexistence is to be achieved,” states the 2018 report that came out of the task force's work.
Predictability is key for successful coexistence – for both people and wildlife.
“The greater the certainty provided for both people and wildlife, the more success there will be in modifying human and wildlife behaviour to increase separation in space and/or time, thereby reducing human-wildlife occurrences,” states the report.
According to the task force, managing human disturbance to maintain amounts of natural habitat and connectivity of patches is a well-accepted approach for ecosystem health and resiliency.
Thresholds for human use in areas designated for wildlife have been established for some species, such as grizzly bears, in certain areas, including in neighbouring Banff National Park.
However, the human-wildlife coexistence task force found that even if human use thresholds are determined, it is not clear if there is an appetite for recreationalists to limit their use of an area for the benefit of wildlife.
“These are difficult questions that need to be resolved,” states the report.
In addition to using closures and warnings reactively in response to hazardous wildlife persisting in an area due to a temporary, elk calving, kill site, or berry crop, the task force said there are many examples of successfully managing human use proactively to improve habitat quality for wary wildlife, or to provide security at key times of day, or during certain seasons when carnivores are provisioning young.
Examples of human use management tools include annual seasonal closures, restricted trail access and temporal travel restrictions at certain times of year or day – all tried and tested in Banff and proven successful.
“Monitoring has demonstrated the effectiveness of many of these efforts,” states the report.
“When we are able to provide wary wildlife with predictable patterns of human use, they often respond by taking advantage of windows of time, or specific locations, where human use is reduced.”
