A critical part of ensuring mining is sustainable is to carefully monitor impacts on these globally important areas and to ensure we can still meet our commitments to protecting and restoring biodiversity while meeting climate targets. A sustainability mindset would lead to investments in science to better understand what is at stake from environmental and social perspective, as an alternative to subsidizing road building that breaks up intact areas.

If we truly want our minerals to be “green,” we have a lot more work to do.

WCS scientists worked with Neskantaga youth to show what types of samples could be taken from lake sturgeon to monitor ages, health indicators, and contaminant levels in this important fish, as Neskantaga develops a lake sturgeon stewardship program.

This fascinating fish has declined through most of its range, but has some of its healthiest populations in northern Ontario, including in the Neskantaga homeland. It’s an example of the kinds of values that are being overlooked in the rush to develop mineral resources in these remote areas. The piece does a great job of diving into the issues of what opening this globally important intact area could mean for fish and other animals, and for the people that depend on this wildlife.

Wolverines are, for the most part, loners. They travel across huge territories and that makes studying these elusive creatures incredibly challenging. That’s why our lead wolverine scientist, Dr. Matt Scrafford, is so excited about a successful WCS-led effort to sequence the entire wolverine genome for the first time.

Having a full map of wolverine DNA is a sort of magic key for opening the door on many research questions and for identifying individual animals and assessing their health through hair or scat. As Matt told Cabin Radio, “It is a powerful thing, in the sense that we can now get so much more information from simple, non-invasive biological samples.”

WCS Canada’s wolverine team has been live trapping wolverines around Red Lake, Ontario for five winters now to understand how they are faring in a landscape with a mix of intact forest and industrial logging activity, an area that is also being altered by climate change. Now they have a new tool for sampling wolverines — one that will not require trekking through freezing cold nights to check distant traps. 

Listen to Matt explaining the importance of the DNA sequencing on CBC. 

TVO also zooms in on these amazing animals in a segment from its series about life around the Great Lakes that includes some great footage of wolverines in the wild. A five-minute watch that will make you want to learn more about these rarely seen animals.

WCS Canada President Dr. Justina Ray makes the case for caribou in a TVO piece that asks whether Ontario should have an official animal. Justina has spent hundreds of hours tracking caribou from small planes flying across northern Ontario, so she speaks from experience when she says “You fall in love with the animals first through their tracks, because they’re such beautiful patterns ... you’re flying for awhile … then coming across a collection of tracks that are crossing large open areas … and then you come upon them. I’ve been privileged enough to be able to see wildlife spectacles like that, and caribou never disappoint in that respect. They’re very symbolic and illustrative of wild, remote places that we have not yet spoiled through industrial development.”

Regardless of whether or not caribou become Ontario’s official animal, they are officially a species WCS Canada is paying a great deal of attention to as roads, mines and forestry spread further north.

Let the voting begin!

Dan’s passion for nature has deep roots. The seed was planted in his childhood home in the countryside around Waterloo, Ontario. Here he spent many happy hours exploring the wild spaces around his home, coming across everything from yellow-spotted salamanders to pileated woodpeckers. But the fragility of these pockets of nature came home to him when a part of the forest where he had caught salamanders and watched woodpeckers was bulldozed to make way for a gravel pit.

That was among the experiences that set Dan out on a path to becoming a conservation scientist with hopes of sharing his love of the natural world in a way that would help people better understand why it needed to be protected. Now after 25 years of working in the field of conservation science, Dan remains a big believer in sharing stories and making science accessible as a way to build action for helping nature. At WCS, he is helping to lead initiatives like SHAPE of Nature, an easy-to-understand visual representation of the state of our natural world and the threats it faces, and the Key Biodiversity Areas (KBAs) program, which involves everyone from scientists to local nature buffs in a quest to identify special places.

Dan also teaches about wildlife extinction and recovery at the University of Waterloo, while working on his own PhD addressing how to accelerate endangered species recovery, which brings him full circle back to that lost woodland in his own backyard.