The province of BC is spearheading a project to restore features in the Mount Spieker and Mount Bullmoose areas to enhance caribou habitat for the Quintette herd.
The money—$975,679 in total—is being split between two projects.
The lion’s share is to “restore approximately 73.5 kilometres of linear features using functional and ecological methods within high-priority restoration polygons identified in the Strategic Caribou Restoration Implementation Plan, while $10,000 will be used to “develop a proposal to identify priority regions in the Quintette caribou herd range that require restoration after industrial disturbance.”
According to the Quintette Caribou Habitat Restoration plan, written back in 2017, “high elevation habitat that is largely predator free has been identified as a key element to managing South Peace Northern Caribou.”
This high elevation habitat provides a refuge from predators, as well as provides an accessible food source through winter, particularly lichen-bearing windswept ridges.
“Core habitat areas for the Quintette herd have been identified by the province based on habitat modeling in conjunction with telemetry and aerial survey data show that approximately 71,276 ha of the Peace Forest District have been identified as core high-elevation winter habitat for the Quintette herd. Historically, the Quintette herd used two areas for high-elevation winter habitat, one in the Mt. Spieker area and the other in the Quintette Mountain area.”
However, says the document, this high elevation habitat has been compromised, which has in turn affected the behaviour of the Quintette caribou. “The expansion of Trend’s coal mine from Roman Mountain to Quintette Mountain in 2010 shifted caribou habitat use significantly, and the Quintette Mountain group now use low-elevation forested habitat in the winter where predation risk is higher. This shift resulted in additional modeling to identify and protect low-elevation core winter habitat used by the displaced Quintette caribou.”
This was just the latest (at the time) step in the fragmentation and loss of caribou habitat. Indeed, according to an analysis conducted as part of the 2017 joint federal-provincial study of the Central Mountain herds, 57.6 percent of the “non-high elevation portion of the Quintette range is disturbed. Meanwhile, a target of 65 percent undisturbed habitat is “an important threshold to providing a 60 percent chance that a local population will be self sustaining.”
The funding will help transition “anthropogenically disturbed, low quality caribou habitat into higher quality habitat, with a particular focus on linear disturbances.”
Habitat restoration, says the report, will “reduce the benefits that predators (and their primary prey) gain through linear corridor use and movement from low to high elevations, and establish a vegetation trajectory on these corridors that will, in the long-term, increase caribou habitat intactness.”
A linear corridor is a connected series of areas devoid of trees such as a road, a clearcut, or a cutline, that allow predators such as wolves access into winter habitat that the caribou use.
The Quintette herd hit a low of about 74 caribou in 2018, but by 2023, that number had grown to 124.
Above photo: A herd of caribou in the alpine. Photo provided
Trent is the publisher of Tumbler RidgeLines.
