Scientists aim to track caribou, ticks and more, like forecasting weather, amid warming climate

Before starting your day — deciding on an activity or how to dress for the elements — you might do the same thing Michael Dietze does.

"I pick up my phone and check the weather forecast at least once or twice a day to see what's likely to come," he said. 

Dietze dedicates his time working on the type of forecasting that's commonplace for the weather, but to help handle other environmental challenges, as a professor leading the Ecological Forecasting Laboratory at Boston University.

Traditionally, environmental management references stable norms, such as well-established wildlife habitats or a 50-year flood, said Dietze.

However, with climate change, Dietze says those benchmarks are becoming obsolete, and people shouldn't think we're now in a "new normal" when it's more like a "state of continuous readjustment."

"And so if your baselines are changing on a continuous basis, you have to take a new approach to … environmental management."

That new approach includes "ecological forecasts" — looking at a multitude of scenarios and problems  — which can help us adapt to the unpredictability around us proactively, rather than reactively.

It's an approach Frances Stewart, assistant professor at Wilfrid Laurier University and Canada Research Chair in Northern Wildlife Biology, is taking in her collaborative work on wildlife.

If you take the concept of a weather forecast, she said, you are starting with many different models — such as temperature, precipitation, wind changes and more. However, it's how those things interact that allows us to project what conditions will look like hours or days away.

"But unless those models are able to talk to each other, you don't have a forecast, you don't have a radar map, you don't have trend lines or predictions of what might happen the next day. We're starting to be able to do the same thing in ecology, and we're able to do it quickly, easily, repeatedly."

In a recent paper, Stewart and her colleagues apply this concept to boreal caribou habitat in the Northwest Territories. To do so, they included different predictions about boreal caribou habitat in a computer program to create a projection, or forecast, of how these things will interact in the coming century.

Stewart said by combining predictions about climate change, wildfires, and how tree species composition might shift and change, they were able to create a forecast of the Northwest Territories boreal habitat. Their results paint a mixed picture for the future.

"It's pretty much an OK news story. What we're seeing is that there will be large shifts in the northern boreal forest and that's going to affect where caribou are expected to be found," said Stewart.

Overall, their forecast shows that the amount of boreal caribou habitat in the Northwest Territories will slightly decline by the end of the century. However, it also shows that remaining habitat is likely to push northward than it is currently, which Stewart said provides an opportunity to think about both the present and the future of boreal caribou conservation.