BANFF – When wildlife biologist Jesse Whittington thinks about connectivity, he thinks about how much stronger people are when connected to friends and family and how much more resilient communities are when residents work together.
“The same applies to wildlife populations. Full connectivity is the ability of animals to travel between patches and survive and reproduce,” he said during a panel discussion on wildlife corridors and connectivity at the 25th annual Banff National Park planning forum round table on March 18.
“What we see is that large connected wildlife populations are much more resilient and much more likely to persist. If you have small isolated fragmented populations, just mathematically and what we see on the ground, is they are more likely to perish.”
Whittington, a biologist with Parks Canada, told the story of a small, remnant Banff National Park caribou herd that was wiped out by a deadly avalanche near Molar Creek north of Lake Louise in 2009. Banff is no longer home to caribou.
“That was a small population that had up to 26 individuals, but then declined and the final five died in an avalanche in 2009," he said.
“Even without that, that population would have struggled to recover without bison-type survival rates and reproductive rates.”
Parks Canada has spent considerable effort over the past five years trying to estimate connectivity and what it means for wildlife populations in Banff National Park.
On a larger scale throughout the Canadian Rockies, a study published about two years ago examined approximately 1,000 genetic samples of grizzly bears.
“We looked at genetic connectivity throughout the Rockies, and generally connectivity was very high, though things like roads impeded connectivity, but overall it was pretty good,” Whittington said.
“When you look at Banff National Park and the backcountry, wildlife can move at will, with a high level of connectivity, but it changes when you move into the Bow Valley."
Whittington pointed to a scientific paper he has co-authored on grizzly bear trends in Banff National Park over the past 12 years. The peer-reviewed study will be published in the coming weeks.
At a high level, he said the grizzly bear population in Banff has increased from just over 60 to a little more than 70 grizzly bears.
At the same time, he said the density of bear activity near paved roads and areas busy with human use has declined.
“We also see a concurrent decrease in the number of crossings on the Trans-Canada Highway wildlife crossing structures, so we are seeing some reduction in connectivity,” he said.
“Some of that could have been increases in highway mortality, railway mortality, natural mortality in that time period, but … we have a ton of evidence on the ground that bears generally avoid people.”
Connecting corridors
In the past 30 years, Parks Canada has built 48 crossing structures, including seven overpasses and 41 underpasses, to help wildlife cross the busy Trans-Canada Highway in Banff National Park – one of Parks Canada's biggest conservation success stories that has seen approximately 260 grizzly bear crossings every year.
“Any bear that grows up in the Bow Valley learns how to use those things, but what’s interesting is things can change over time,” Whittington said.
Studies have shown the wolverine population has declined about 40 per cent over a 12-year period from 2011-23 in Banff, Kootenay, and Yoho National Parks from approximately 39 to 21.
Research has also indicated wolverine populations further south beyond Banff were more fragmented and isolated.
Whittington said there are not many wolverines between the south end of Banff National Park and Waterton Lakes National Park.
He said during the early stages of post-construction of the Trans-Canada Highway crossing structures, four female wolverines crossed the highway.
“In recent years, we’ve replicated that study and we have far fewer wolverines and we didn’t have any female wolverine cross the Trans-Canada Highway,” he said.
“That is a cause for concern because if we have 21 wolverine in Banff, Kootenay, Yoho, and we have six on the south side of the Trans-Canada Highway, and there’s not many wolverine to the south of Banff National Park, what’s the likelihood of those wolverine to the south persisting if they don’t stay connected.”
Parks Canada has about 25 corridor transects around the Banff townsite, which are monitored several times a year for wolf and cougar tracks.
“In the broader Bow Valley, we’re detecting these animals about 50 per cent of the time in the Fairholme and Bow Valley Parkway and as we get closer to the town of Banff, our detection rates drop and drop and drop,” said Whittington.
“The important thing is that for animals to travel from the Fairholme to Vermilion Lakes and Bow Valley Parkway, they have to travel around the town of Banff and we’re seeing that the movements are already compromised.”
A University of Alberta study, published in January in the Journal of Applied Ecology, showed 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.
The study led by Peter Thompson, a former postdoctoral fellow with the U of A’s professor of biological sciences Colleen Cassady St. Clair, showed wolves stay 600 metres away and grizzlies 300 metres from busy trails – far further than expected.
Cassady St. Clair, who was also a panel member at the Banff planning forum, said the research – which used 2007-22 data from remote cameras installed by Parks Canada and Alberta Parks in the Bow Valley and surrounding areas – discovered the zone of human influence on wildlife is much bigger than previously thought.
“The bad news is we have a much bigger and more cumulative effect with our recreation than we realize,” she said.
“We will need to look at ways to segregate human use from these other species and we might do that both spatially and temporally, and contextually.”
Whittington said there is variability in how species respond to a lot of human activity, noting some animals will tolerate a high level of human activity and others remain completely wary and stay away.
“Think about The Boss. He’s walking down Vermilion Lakes Road, he’s not very scared of people, but what you don’t see is there’s three female grizzly bears on the Fairholme Range that will not come anywhere near people,” he said.
“When they want to go up the Cascade, one of their strategies instead of feeding and resting along the way, is that they might travel quickly or travel through at night. There’s a couple different strategies animals use.”
John Paczkowski, human-wildlife coexistence team leader for Alberta Parks and panel member at the planning forum, compared wildlife corridors to a circulatory system of veins and arteries.
“You have to have enough space for these animals to flow through if you’re thinking of wildlife as the blood going through,” he said.
“In the 30-plus years we’ve started to see that those veins and arteries are getting occluded, they’re getting blocked, they’re not flowing very well,” he said.
Bow Valley critically important
Harvey Locke, one of the founders of the Yellowstone to Yukon (Y2Y) Conservation Initiative vision, said the Bow Valley is critically important to wildlife movement as one of only four east-west breaks across the Canadian Rockies.
He spoke to the success of restoration efforts of a wildlife corridor on the north side of the Banff townsite below Cascade Mountain in the late 1990s, with removal of the buffalo paddock, cadet camp, relocation of government and public horse corrals and non-emergency closure of the airstrip.
“This was a really big point of pride for Banff park and the first time anybody proved you could restore a corridor was in this park in that corridor – a fantastic accomplishment,” Locke said during the panel discussion.
That’s one of the reasons Locke said he finds plans for an intercept parking lot on the north side of the train tracks at the west entrance to the Banff townsite as “inconceivable”, arguing it will negatively impact the wildlife corridor.
“I am sorry, but this is just bonkers. We cannot put a parking lot in that corridor and that’s what’s proposed right now between the Fenlands rec centre and railway tracks where we know animals move,” he said.
“We just can’t do that because we would be unravelling everything that we spent 30 years doing, so we’ve got to find another way to deal with our visitor challenges … but we can’t be doing that because that’s a disaster.”
Cassady St. Clair spoke of the importance of restoration efforts for wildlife.
“After the cadet camp and other infrastructure was removed and the buffalo paddock was taken out, it was almost immediate that wolf tracks were detected and I remember visiting a cougar kill in the old buffalo paddock,” she said.
“The predators responded immediately.”
While corridor restoration near Banff in the 1990s and highway crossing structures have been widely touted, Whittington said other measures in Banff National Park have also been highly successful.
He spoke of the annual nighttime closure to vehicles along the eastern stretch of the Bow Valley Parkway each spring, a critical time of year for wildlife.
“We have three independent datasets that show wildlife use close to the Bow Valley Parkway doubled during those nighttime closures,” Whittington said.
Cassady St. Clair said maintaining corridors and connectivity not only matters for the viability of wildlife populations, but also for the safety of people.
“There has to be a degree of separation between where people are recreating and where wildlife are achieving this necessary movement. … We have new challenges to make sure corridors function as corridors while keeping people safe and I think we have a measure to go still on that front,” she said.
“When wildlife are moving through habitat, they don’t look at a map and say, ‘this is a corridor. I’ll scamper through quickly, and only at night’. They are making these minute-by-minute decisions in a cost-benefit way.”
Banff not an island
Adam Linnard, Y2Y’s landscape protection manager, said as big as Banff is, it isn’t big enough in an ecological context.
“That’s why connectivity has to be considered at the big scale and that does mean that all these issues are issues for Banff’s survival. It’s not just the role Banff plays in connectivity across the landscape; it’s all those disturbed landscapes everywhere else play in the viability of Banff,” said Linnard, also a panelist.
“Coal mining, for example, that is one of those massive threats to that connectivity between the south end of Banff and Waterton. That is not on the Banff National Park agenda, I don’t imagine very often, but it needs to be.”
Linnard said there is constant pressure on public lands adjacent to Banff National Park, noting the province has a goal to double tourism. Alberta’s updated tourism strategy released in 2024 aims to grow tourism revenues to $25 billion by 2035.
“That’s being pursued through all-season resort development and commercial resort development on public lands not that far from here, starting with Nakiska, Fortress, Castle Mountain,” Linnard.
“There’s so much pressure on Alberta public lands that is going to have a massive impact on Banff and Banff needs to have a voice in that.”
Panel members also spoke about the detrimental effects on wildlife of unsanctioned or undesignated trail networks, noting science shows unmanaged human recreation on trails can be just as harmful as development when it comes to how wildlife use – or don’t use – the Bow Valley.
“We have to be smarter about concentrating our human use in the specific areas that are designated for that and stop allowing trail networks, in particular, to proliferate everywhere,” said Cassady St. Clair.
She spoke of the importance of the Canmore Area Trails Strategy (CATS).
“In a nutshell, I think the work that’s going on with the CATS program in Canmore, for example, to consolidate these trails and help people understand the need to stick to those designated trails and avoid making additional trails – especially taking their off-leash dogs there – that’s really critical work, especially because of the increasing use that we’re seeing throughout the region but in the Bow Valley in particular,” she said.
Panellists indicated the biggest stressor for wildlife connectivity in the next 25 years will be increasing visitation, which is strongly influenced by social media.
There are about 4.1 million visitors to Banff National Park every year, with the number of visitors to Kananaskis Country trailing not that far behind.
Whittington said it is important to figure out how to concentrate and provide visitors with the awe-inspiring experience they are seeking, while providing secure habitat for wildlife.
“When we think about experiences out on the trails 15 years ago, it was peaceful, and now it’s just choc-o-block full of people … visitation encroaching into a lot of really good, productive wildlife habitat, and once you have a lot of people in these areas it’s really hard to protect them for wildlife,” he said.
“Looking small scale and large scale, one of the biggest ways we can promote connectivity is to ensure we are securing habitat for wildlife, where they have spaces they can live and survive, where they’re not disturbed by people, and we’re linking those habitats throughout the landscape.”
Paczkowski said he hopes wildlife connectivity will still be intact 25 years from now.
“There’s a vision there that in 100 years people will look back and say, ‘wow, those people had a vision to maintain connectivity and they lived up to that standard,” he said.
“My biggest fear is we will let it slip away, and be a point in history.”
Locke said the Bow Valley as a whole needs to do better for wildlife.
“Every question we ask shouldn’t be ‘how do I get away with doing more?’ It should be ‘how can I contribute by making it better?’” he said.
“Out there in the big world, there’s a biodiversity crisis. Things are going very badly indeed for nature all over the world, and in this park we need to be setting the gold standard of what better looks like.”
