A study examining data on the movement of grizzly bears and wolves in the Bow Valley in Alberta shows that the animals avoid cities and developed areas when there are many people around.
A study published last month in the journal Movement Ecology analyzed two decades of global positioning information from 34 grizzly bears and 33 wolves. The animals were provided with collars in and around Banff National Park west of Calgary.
“We really wanted to understand how grizzly bears and wolves use the landscape and respond to our activities both inside and outside national parks,” said Jesse Whittington, a wildlife ecologist at Banff Park who co-authored the study.
The data, he said, includes 156,000 GPS locations collected in an area of about 17,000 square kilometers.
Researchers have found that grizzly bears and wolves react differently to humans depending on whether it is day or night and how close they are to developed areas.
“One of the striking things about our paper is the strategies wolves and grizzly bears use to avoid meeting people,” Whittington said. “As they travel through the landscape, if they have a choice, they will try to avoid meeting us.”
Whittington said that means animals pass through cities and all sorts of places with a lot of people.
“The places they choose to eat and rest, which are absolutely necessary for their survival … are far from cities and have very low human use,” he said.
“When we have busy landscapes like the Bow Valley, we need to make sure that they provide a safe, high-quality habitat that has minimal human disturbance.
Mark Heblewight, a professor of wildlife biology at the University of Montana and co-author of the study, said the results were important.
A study published last month in the journal Movement Ecology analyzed two decades of global positioning information from 34 grizzly bears and 33 wolves in and around Banff National Park west of Calgary. (Canadian Press)
“Development in the Bow Valley has been a conservation challenge for decades for both Parks Canada and the Alberta Environment and Canmore,” he said.
The study, he said, was partly sparked by a debate in the town of Canmore, bordering Banff National Park, on whether to allow more development on its eastern edge.
“This development has the potential to reshape not only Canmore, but the ecological integrity of the entire region, including Banff National Park,” said Heblewight.
A draft of the study was submitted to the city last year during hearings on two proposed projects that would double the population in the coming decades.
The proposals, which include about 80 percent of Canmore’s remaining development land, were rejected by the city council. Now they are in court after the entrepreneur sues the city.
Experts presenting at the hearings said the plan to provide homes for another 14,500 residents and tourists would add more pressure to the already bustling valley.
Hebblewhite said he and other researchers want to expand the environmental debate.
“Our goal in this analysis was to try to provide a greater context for the effects of this development and other developments in general,” he said. “Large predators, which are the leading species, are only an indicator of all other species.”
He noted that the Bow Valley has already lost 80 to 85 percent of its best wildlife habitat, and projects proposed in Canmore would increase that by another three percent.
“Someone might say, ‘Three percent, that’s not a big deal,'” he said. “But that moves the needle from 85 percent of damaged and lost habitat to 88 percent.
“I think this is important because it puts the debate about this property or this property in the context of the whole valley.”
It is reaching the point where animals will not be able to cross the Bow Valley, a key corridor used by animals to move in the Rockies, Hebblewhite said.
The study has even greater implications, he added.
“One of the main challenges facing national parks – not just in Canada, not just in Banff, but around the world – is exactly what is happening in Canmore: an explosion and a thriving development on the park’s border. Because why? “Everyone wants to live there,” he said.
“Without some coordinated federal, provincial plan, the same thing that draws everyone to live there will make him be loved to death.”
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