The Ontario government should halt all logging and road building in endangered woodland caribou habitat, as six out of nine known populations below the 51st parallel are at risk of collapsing, environmentalists warn.
A report released today by the Wildlands League reveals the formerly pristine habitats of six caribou populations have already been disturbed by logging and wildfires to the point where they likely will no longer sustain the extremely sensitive species.
A seventh caribou range is close to the established threshold beyond which scientists say caribou become too exposed to predators and no longer reproduce sufficiently to maintain their numbers.
"We've always suspected trouble. We didn't realize it was this bad," says Anna Baggio, director of conservation with the Wildlands League, the Ontario branch of the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society.
"We're already in emergency mode for this species," says her colleague, Trevor Hesselink, who wrote the report. "The government has to stop exacerbating the situation."
Woodland caribou are among the first species to be actively protected under Ontario's new Endangered Species Act. But the government is still developing its conservation plan and has not yet introduced habitat legislation for it that would lay out specifically where development could and could not occur. In the meantime, the province continues to issue logging permits.
Natural Resources Minister Donna Cansfield says all logging companies already have to submit plans that include caribou management. Her staff has assembled a panel of caribou scientists to develop a conservation strategy for the species.
"If there is new information out there, we are more than open to it," she said yesterday. "But I feel very confident we will have a very good strategy in place and very good regulation in place, based on good science, more research and the best advice in the world."
The caribou are considered an indicator species, reflecting the health of the boreal forest. They thrive only in untouched forest, roaming vast distances in solitude and feeding on lichen. They are extremely sensitive to development, as roads invariably bring predators, such as wolves. Once roaming as far south as Algonquin Park, their numbers have been cut in half over the past century.
"The more disturbances in an area, whether by fire or by humans, the less likely they persist," says Jim Schaefer, a professor of biology at Trent University who has studied the caribou for 25 years.
Schaefer was part of a science advisory group that produced the first large-scale national study on woodland caribou habitat for Environment Canada last year. They determined that if more than about a third of a caribou population's range is disturbed , the population will decline.The Toronto Star
