Craighead Environmental Research Institute

Conservation Area Design Conservation Biology & Genetics Conservation GIS Conservation Education About Us Links Join Us The mission of the Institute is to increase humankind's understanding, appreciation, and protection of our natural environment; particularly wildlife populations and wild landscapes.  Our goal is to enable human beings to live in harmony with other species.

The Kakwa Provincial Park Grizzly Habitat and Movement Study In interior B.C. we are cooperating with the Valhalla Wilderness Society and other groups of the Y2Y coalition on a field study to determine grizzly bear use and travel corridors in Kakwa Provincial Park. Lance and April Craighead assisted Wayne McCrory with non-invasive field work using remote cameras, DNA from hair samples, and track and sign surveys to determine the spatial context of grizzly bear use, and to help plan the siting of future Kakwa Park facilities. Additional studies, including GIS analysis, are being done to ensure that Kakwa Park remains connected to other protected areas in the region. The Park itself is too small to support a population of grizzly bears for the long term (1000+ years) so it is vital to maintain movement habitat that will enable bears to travel to other areas in the region at different times of the year. Some investigations will be done to determine how much use the Kakwa bears make of salmon runs in the adjacent Fraser River system. A progress report was completed in 2002 by the Valhalla Wilderness Society: This report summarizes the results from the 2001 field season and first DRAFT report iteration of an ecological connectivity - human use study in the Canadian Rockies - Kakwa Provincial Park. This project was carried out by McCrory Wildlife Services Ltd. GIS analysis was provided by Applied Conservation GIS. B.C. Parks provided much support, permission to use the study area and the research facilities. . Besides grizzly bear habitat mapping, team biologists used remote cameras and tracking to conclude that the Kakwa Lake area, including McGregor Pass and Providence Pass, is a major travel corridor across the Rocky Mountains for grizzly bears, wolves, caribou and other wildlife. The main travel routes include many of the primitive park trails, such as the abandoned mine ("Tote") road on the west side of Kakwa Lake. In order to retain these significant wildlife corridor values, the study team recommended the priority of future management of Kakwa be for grizzly bear/wildlife conservation as part of a large Rocky Mountain Carnivore Conservation Area. This would include managing access into the Kakwa Park to limit visitor levels to the current status quo. High levels of visitor use and excess development are predicted to lead to serious grizzly bear-human encounters as well as major wildlife disturbances in the Kakwa Lake trans-mountain corridor. Data is being finalized in two project reports to be completed in May 2002. Field results for the year 2001 were severely constrained by unexpected floods in the area and other weather and access factors. Limited field evidence was obtained from a new study area, Providence Pass, which supported our hypothesis that female grizzly bears are using higher elevation corridor zones more than those at lower elevations. A DEM (Digital Elevation Model) was prepared as a base map. All human facilities within the Kakwa corridor area were surveyed and mapped for the human development layer. Human use for all areas was determined to be currently below known thresholds of disturbance for grizzly bears. It was a rewarding experience to be in an ecosystem where bears still exhibit normal behaviour. In order to help set standards for future management of human recreational use in the Kakwa Corridor, we further tested a GIS Grizzly Bear Encounter Risk Model, with reliable results. Using Eigen Vectors for grizzly bear habitat values, grizzly bear travel information and five other variables, the Model identified areas where grizzly bear-human encounters would be most likely to occur in the trans-mountain corridor. This led to one campsite closure and recommendations to re-route several of the more hazard hiking trails within the corridor zone; with careful management of others. In October 2001, the preliminary results of this research (GIS maps, summary of corridor values) were also incorporated in a major scientific background document (Nash 2001) for a B.C. Parks management plan for the Kakwa protected area. This included identifying the Kakwa Lake area as a major trans-mountain grizzly bear/wildlife corridor through the Rockies that required special management to retain ecological connectivity. Input also included a GIS grizzly bear habitat map and results of the Grizzly Bear Encounter Risk Model showing where the highest conflicts between park visitors and grizzly bears were most likely to occur. We prepared a one-meter by one-meter colour map that was displayed at public meetings attended by 250 people from B.C. and Alberta. This data, including several of our grizzly bear maps, is available online: http://wlapwww.gov.bc.ca/bcparks/planning/mgmtplns/kakwa/kakwa.htm. Our final reports will be posted on the Kakwa Park website when they are completed in May. The study team assessed the viability of extrapolating the current GIS model and map results for similar evaluations in other areas within Y2Y. For management of human recreation in grizzly bear travel corridors, it was felt that the GIS Grizzly Bear Encounter Risk Model would be more reliable than past methods, but caution was needed in local situations. In order to use the Kakwa results to assess connectivity values for grizzly bears and other wildlife in other areas of Y2Y, it was recommended that a least-cost-path model be developed. Another year of research is needed to develop and test a GIS least-cost-path connectivity model. The model will be used to identify primary, secondary and tertiary connectivity areas. Besides using current grizzly bear movement data, additional field research will be required to test the model through random field sampling of select least-cost-path polygons. During this phase of our multi-year project, we learned that high-elevation mountain passes are an important habitat for grizzly bears and other wildlife. This finding has broad implications for protected areas design and bear management programs throughout the Yellowstone-to-Yukon corridor, as well as elsewhere.