BOW VALLEY – A new study shows that grizzly bears and wolves keep hundreds of metres away from the busiest human use trails in the Bow Valley, making it difficult for wary wildlife to travel through and live in these important habitats.
Previous research has shown wildlife avoid busy trails, but Peter Thompson, a biologist and postdoctoral researcher at the University of Alberta, said this latest study takes it to a whole new level by showing wolves stay 600 metres away and grizzlies 300 metres.
“Our results suggest that recreationalists using trails have more of an effect on bears and wolves than was previously thought, as the disturbance produced by human recreation can displace wildlife by hundreds of metres,” he said.
“One of the key takeaways of our work is there are noticeably fewer detections of these animals even when they are still there. The detections are noticeably fewer nearby some of these high use recreational trails in the valley and this effect extends hundreds of meters away from the trail.”
The University of Alberta study, titled Integrating Human Trail Use in Montane Landscapes Reveals Larger Zones of Human Influence for Wary Carnivores found at https://besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1365-2664.14837, was published in the Journal of Applied Ecology on Monday (Jan. 6).
Over the course of more than a year, Thompson worked with Colleen St. Clair of the U of A’s biological sciences department, Alberta Parks’ John Paczkowski, and Parks Canada’s Jesse Whittington to analyze remote camera data that documented grizzly bears, wolves, and humans recreating on trails.
The camera dataset from 2007-22 spans a large area of the central Rockies including Banff, Yoho and Kootenay national parks and neighbouring provincial areas, with many of the cameras deployed throughout the Bow Valley including the wildlife corridors and habitat patches surrounding Canmore.
Remote motion-triggered cameras automatically photograph wildlife and people that pass in front of them, which scientists say makes them one of the most efficient and effective monitoring tools for studying large mammals.
With images captured from more than 1,000 remote cameras, Thompson said he found that human recreation on trails displaces grizzly bears and wolves from their natural habitats even when the trails are hundreds of metres away.
He said the cameras picked up grizzly bears and wolves tens of thousands of times each, noting their detected patterns were related to detection of about one million people the cameras also picked up on the landscape.
“Our results show that detection rates of grizzlies and wolves decreased at cameras with more human detections, but also at cameras near other high-use trails,” Thompson said.
Using statistical models, researchers were able to quantify the exact strength of this interaction.
It showed wolves are more wary than grizzly bears.
“The strongest disturbance effects take place within 300 metres for grizzlies and 600 metres for wolves,” Thompson said. “In other words, high-use recreational trails in the Bow Valley decrease the quality of more than half a kilometre of surrounding habitat for some species.”
The Bow Valley, including Banff National Park and areas outside the park like Canmore, is a global hotspot for outdoor recreation, attracting millions of visitors each year. Visitation is more than 4.1 million in Banff National Park and has exploded in neighbouring Kananaskis Country.
This area is world-renowned for its scenery as well as opportunities for hiking, mountain biking, rock climbing, skiing, and many other recreational pursuits – but it’s also one of the busiest places where grizzly bears still survive.
The permanent resident population in both Banff and Canmore has also grown over time. While Banff has regulations in place to control development, Canmore has seen an explosion in development over the past two decades.
Even in national parks or areas designated as wildlife corridors or critical habitat patches, Thompson said there are few to no limits on the density of recreational use by people.
“The thing that sticks with me is just how much this landscape has changed in the last 200 years, although people have been in the Bow Valley since time immemorial and there’s been a relationship between the Indigenous people in those areas,” he said.
“So much of the valley has literally been cut down and destroyed for highways and railroads, which of course are necessary for people to get around, but it just really brings home how pinched we already are with respect to wildlife corridors in natural areas for grizzly bears and wolves and other species.”
Thompson said the results demonstrate a path forward for better coexistence between humans and wildlife in the Bow Valley.
He hopes the work can help influence the philosophy behind how trail networks are maintained and how human use on those trails is regulated.
“We learned that large carnivores need space away from high-use recreational trails to move across their extensive mountain ranges,” Thompson said.
“Our work identifies specific thresholds and targets that can be integrated into land use planning efforts, which can reroute trails sufficiently far away from high-quality wildlife habitat.”
The research also emphasizes the importance of human behaviour in wildlife conservation.
“When you are out on the landscape, then when you’re in a natural area, it’s important to be mindful of your impact on wildlife and that the impacts are often bigger than what you see,” Thompson said.
“For example, with grizzly bears as far as 300 metres away from the trail, that effect is 50 per cent as strong as it is when you’re sitting on the trail. It was even greater for wolves.
“Even far away, we’re seeing significant decreases in the detection rates of these species so they’re using these areas less than they would be if there wasn’t a trail there at all.”
The study also speaks to cumulative effects – changes to the environment caused by a variety of activities over time.
“It’s not just the nearest feature that has an impact, there are these cumulative effects, especially when there are multiple high-use trails in a tightly packed area, which we see quite frequently around Canmore and in the Bow Valley,” Thompson said.
The study also verified use of illegal, or so-called pirate trails.
“We were able to document that human use on these illegal trails was 65 per cent as much as on formal designated trails. Obviously, it’s less, but the fact that it’s even remotely close, to me, was quite startling,” he said.
Thompson said trail users might not realize they are interrupting movement and habitat security for a diverse array of wildlife that includes bears, wolves, cougars, and other wary species that must navigate an intensifying maze of outdoor recreation, habitat modification, and human development.
Large ungulates, including moose, elk, and deer must also adapt to both humans and their infrastructure, he said, noting the Bow Valley is an important east-west valley connecting the prairies to the Continental Divide.
“It’s really important to keep in mind just how important it is that we keep these existing remaining natural areas as pristine and safe and secure as possible for wildlife,” he said.
“We believe that the Bow Valley has room for humans, bears, wolves, and more, but we all must work together to create a landscape that makes co-existence possible.”
