The Canadian portion of the Crown of the Continent (CCoC) ecosystem has been identified as crucial for wolverines north of the US border to rescue or supply individuals and genes through dispersal to the highly fragmented population in the northern US Rocky Mountains. Highway 3, motorized recreation, and a growing resource extraction industry, however, increasingly fragment this critical landscape. This project will capitalize on multi-year wolverine occupancy and genetic data collected noninvasively in a >40,000 km2 area encompassing the core protected areas of the central Canadian Rocky Mountains to the north; and Glacier-Waterton Lakes National Park complex in the south. Our goal is to obtain spatially-explicit information on the wolverine population, connectivity, and habitat relationships in the largely unstudied and vitally important international transboundary linkage region.
Objectives1. Conduct survey of wolverine occurrence in the Canadian Crown of the Continent (CCoC) using noninvasive methods.2. Develop occupancy models of wolverine distribution and estimate density.3. Identify core habitats, dispersal corridors and highway mitigation.4. Assess the effect of highways on wolverine gene flow and fine-scale genetic structure in the Crown of the Continent region.5. Communication of science ad technology transfer.
