Future of Recreation: Caring for Wildlife
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How to recreate without having a negative impact on ecosystems
If a hiker walks on a trail does the bear notice? This is not a philosophical play on the old one about a tree falling in the forest. It’s a serious question more and more biologists, land managers and recreationalists are searching to understand.
Study after study is showing that just the presence of people in the backcountry can cause behavioural change in species ranging from grizzly bears to bull trout. Known as recreation ecology, the research field is gaining importance as the backcountry gets busier.
“If you go for a hike alone in an isolated area, you probably have a limited impact on wildlife,” says Annie Loosen, a recreation ecology researcher with Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative. “But added up over time, these independent occurrences of small groups have a stronger effect.”
A telling example is a study led by Dr. Cole Burton, the lead researcher at the University of BC’s Wildlife Coexistence Lab, during COVID-19 lockdowns. He collaborated with 200 other researchers who monitor wildlife cameras set up around the world to compare animal movement when the trails were busy with people to when they were empty.
“Notably, animals living in wilder landscapes were more sensitive to increases in human activity, while their urban cousins tended to be more tolerant but shifted to being more active at night,” says Burton. “This highlights that even within the same species, animals can have different responses to people depending on where they live.”
The study concluded that it’s important to monitor levels of outdoor recreation and human use to avoid displacing sensitive animals, even in remote locations. Already, recreation is the fourth leading threat to species at risk in Canada, Loosen says.
“In terms of footprint, recreation nowhere near matches the threat presented by forestry or mining,” she says. “But I think it highlights the prospect that people going out and recreating isn’t no effect.”
To better understand the latest research and what recreation groups can do to reduce their impact on wildlife, Outdoor Recreation Council focused on the topic for its July webinar. Watch a recording here and a key takeaways document is here.
Panelists included Farhad Moghimehfar, who talked about crowding and tourism’s role in recreation ecology, Michelle McLellan, a wildlife biologist with the University of British Columbia Okanagan, shared the work she has done with the Nelson Cycling Club, and Brynn McLellan from Y2Y who presented research led by Loosen.
Loosen’s study sought to understand how increased recreation in the area along the southern BC-Alberta border might be impacting wildlife. To do so they first catalogued all the linear features in the area: trails, roads and other cuts through the forest, like seismic lines. This took a year of work and revealed that 25 percent of features were not in any government database and thus were unmanaged. They then compared the linear feature data to previous research on the thresholds of animal behaviour shifts.
The study revealed the “linear density” exceeded thresholds for grizzly bears in eight of the 30 watersheds the researchers examined and 16 of 30 for bull trout, which are especially sensitive to in-stream disturbance and trail erosion. With the help of scientists at the University of Northern BC they are now furthering the research by overlapping the linear features with areas that are known to be especially good habitat for mountain caribou, wolverine and grizzly bear.
This is the kind of data land managers need to make better decisions on where to focus recreation and where it should be discouraged, says Loosen.
“We need recreation to be part of modernized land use planning,” she says. “We need to direct where, as a mountain biker, I should bike or as a snowmobiler where I should snowmobile.”
With that kind of data in hand land managers can better steer where recreation occurs and where infrastructure gets built. Where the trails already exist there are ways of reducing interactions with wildlife, says Michelle McLellan. During the webinar she shared the work she’s done with the Nelson Cycling Club to reduce human-grizzly bear interactions.
The two pronged strategy aimed to warn bears and educate the humans. The first focused on sight, sound and scent lines: cutting back overgrown sections, rerouting trails out of gullies and intentionally building noisy wooden features. All give bears more time to realize humans are coming and get off the trail. For humans they increased signage, both physical and online, to make sure trail users knew that bears used the network too and what to do to avoid running into them. This included closing trails when bears were in the area and adding extra signage around berry patches in season.
This kind of seasonal approach is critical to balancing the need to protect wildlife, while allowing people to get the mental and physical benefits of time in nature, says Meg Bjordal, a conservation research and policy coordinator with the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society.
Time specific closures are especially important during vulnerable life stages, like nesting or calving season. It’s already used by BC Parks and outdoor clubs to protect falcons nesting on Squamish’s Chief rock wall, migrating western toad’s in Cumberland and Whistler and mountain caribou throughout western Canada. In Fernie, the trail alliance encourages users to avoid using the network at dawn and dusk, when wildlife is most active.
“People care. They want to do the right thing,” Bjordal says. “We just have to give them the right tools and knowledge to be responsible users.”