Fate of the Caribou Project

PhD candidate Megan and her family are in NWT this week to gather audio recording devices that were programmed to fall off caribou tracking collars this month, joined by Joe from Lutselk'e, and pilot Dave.

The recorders can only carry so much battery power, so Megan built them to detach from the tracking collars before they ran out of power. Each logger, which is about three inches long, is painted bright yellow and has a piece of flagging that unfurls when it separates from the collar. They also emit a Very High Frequency (VHF) signal, allowing Megan and Joe to locate them on the expansive landscape using a telemetry receiver.

Once she's retrieved the recorders, Megan can download the recordings they've collected and start to process the data. She uses machine learning and computer modeling to analyze the thousands of hours of audio, finding patterns in the everyday lives, movement decisions, and environmental experiences of caribou. Follow along as we learn what she discovers!

Turnip the reindeer has bling: Last winter, Turnip and seven other reindeer at the University of Alaska Fairbanks Large Animal Research Center were fitted with acoustic recording devices, then monitored closely to link their activity on the ground to the sounds picked up by the recording devices. As part of her PhD research, team member Megan Perra is developing the recording devices to get fine-scale info on how caribou experience and respond to their environment and each other.

Read more about Turnip and Megan's work in our recent blog post [5-min read]: https://eligurarie.github.io/Micd-Up-Reindeer-Edition/

Our team at Northern Arizona University recently published a new dataset that maps plant biomass across the tundra in 2020. "Aboveground plant biomass" is a measure of how much plant material - stems and leaves - is growing on the surface (so roots are not included). The new dataset also estimates the amount of woody plants (trees & shrubs) across the tundra biome, an important indicator of climate change.

Katie Orndahl, Logan Berner, and Scott Goetz used advanced remote sensing techniques and analysis to map these characteristics at 30-meter resolution, generating a dataset that can be used to track changes in vegetation over time, estimate forage availability for tundra animals, and more.

For links to this and our other extensive vegetation datasets, visit our Resources page: https://fateofthecaribou.github.io/Resources.html

Read the accompanying paper: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S003442572500121X

New! Team member Dr. Ophélie Couriot is taking applications for a 2-year post-doctoral position co-hosted by the University of Alaska Fairbanks and the USGS Alaska Science Center. More info and the link to apply below ⬇️

New postdoc opportunity projecting the effects of climate change on the summer behavior and distributions of caribou in the Arctic. Apply here (job title: "Post Doctoral Fellow - Future of Species Range Shifts"): https://careers.alaska.edu/jobs/post-doctoral-fellow-future-of-species-range-shifts-fairbanks-alaska-united-states Photo by Joëlle Taillon.

Collective Movement
By Chloe Beaupré, Fate of the Caribou Project

Collective movement
ecology aka
Why do they go there?

An exploration of group
caribou navigation

Leadership:
A knowing subset
of informed navigators
guiding the naïve

Many wrongs:
Diverse (noisy, wrong)
opinions make direction
by coalescing

Emergent sensing:
Share observations
(a symphony of heel clicks,
friends) finding their way

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DYK: Fate of the Caribou team members don't just crunch numbers! While we specialize in developing and applying analysis tools to answer ecological questions about caribou, we also explore our research through art, poetry, and prose. Chloe recently published this poem in the Navigating the New Arctic Community Office "Nuna Zine" (pg. 74)
https://drive.google.com/file/d/13jKdWgOAfFEiF8PlyBZuG6zAQrduA1Su/view

Photo by Anne Gunn

'What the Caribou Remember'
Our team's research was recently highlighted by bioGraphic, including insights from project lead Elie Gurarie and our partners at the Wyoming Migration Initiative. Check it out!

What the Caribou Remember - bioGraphic A herd of ungulates in Alaska draws on experience to adapt to a changing winter landscape.

Megan's research was recently highlighted by SUNY ESF - check it out!

North American caribou are on the decline, and more data about their lifestyle can help us help them… PhD student Megan Perra and her team headed to Alaska to do more fine tuning on the audiologgers used to gather environmental data on caribou out in the wild. They will go through audio files that include anything from foraging to airplane activity above the caribou! The goal is to learn more about the environment impacting the caribou and their behavior in a less invasive way 🎤 ___ #sunyesf #research #scientificresearch #graduateresearch #caribou #reindeer #northamericancaribou #wildliferesearch #wildlife

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) recently published the "Arctic Report Card 2024", an annual review of the state of the Arctic. Fate of the Caribou team member Dr. Anne Gunn and partners wrote the chapter on migratory caribou, and Drs. Logan Berner and Scott Goetz were coauthors on the chapter on "tundra greenness" (changing vegetation in the tundra ecosystem). Here are some highlights:

❄️ Migratory caribou herds have declined by 65% in the last 20-30 years. Some coastal herds are recovering, but inland herds are stable or continue to decline.

❄️ Climate change is impacting weather patterns and vegetation communities. This, plus increased human development in the Arctic, is changing caribou movement patterns and populations.

❄️ Tundra greenness, a measure of increased plant productivity due to climate change, continues to break previous records, and reached a new high in the North American Arctic.

Read the full report (Tundra Greenness, pg. 71; Migratory Caribou, pg. 80):

arctic.noaa.gov

Elie recently collaborated on a study looking at how snow conditions may, in part, tell caribou when to migrate. Check out this article on their work:

Snowmelt Sends Caribou Packing - Eos Researchers compared caribou tracking data with satellite observations to learn whether snowpack conditions trigger the animals’ arduous annual migration.

Our partners at the National Park Service recently published a great paper looking at the behavior of caribou that migrated versus those that didn't. Caribou that migrated also spent more time moving around during winter (a non-migration season) compared to caribou that stayed in one area year-round. This suggests that migratory and non-migratory caribou, even within the same herd, use different tactics to meet their nutritional needs, even when it's not a migration season.

Behavioral adaptation to seasonal resource scarcity by Caribou (Rangifer tarandus) and its role in partial migration Migratory Caribou moved twice as much as nonmigratory Caribou during winter, a nonmigratory season. The areas used by migrants had more than 2.5 greater co

Our partners at Global Initiative on Ungulate Migration are at and have two upcoming sessions:

If you're attending the United Nations Biodiversity , GIUM is co-organizing two sessions on the power of animal tracking data and conservation with the Movement of Life Initiative and WWF 's WildLabs.Net on Oct. 29th and 30th! See details here: https://wildlabs.net/event/cop16-event-harnessing-animal-movement-data-meet-biodiversity-goals