Managing wolves to benefit woodland caribou populations in northeast British Columbia: what we know and what we need
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Ecology, Natural Resource Management
- Keywords
- woodland caribou, predator-prey, grey wolf, British Columbia
- Copyright
- © 2016 Wilson
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Preprints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2016. Managing wolves to benefit woodland caribou populations in northeast British Columbia: what we know and what we need. PeerJ Preprints 4:e1942v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.1942v1
Abstract
Predator-prey systems are complex and attempts to manage them to benefit woodland caribou populations have generated mixed results. Despite limited success, calls for wolf control continue because of the urgent need to reverse the decline of woodland caribou populations, and because there are so few management options available that have the potential to demonstrate immediate benefits. I present the results of a policy analysis that reviews the potential role of wolf control within the ecological, social and political context of northeast British Columbia (BC). The scale and scope of a wolf control program is ultimately limited by the economic and ethical support of the public, while the program’s effectiveness is governed by the conditional dependencies among the major factors effecting woodland caribou declines. The policy analysis suggests that the contribution of wolf control programs to caribou conservation efforts in northeast BC will be limited, but that significant uncertainties in the causal pathways resulting in caribou population declines limit our ability to propose alternative management policies that have a high confidence of success.
Author Comment
This is an abstract which has been accepted for the "Predator-Prey Dynamics" conference.