Some Manitoba researchers are looking into the potential impact and overlap of wildfires with polar bear denning habitat.
“We have a warming climate, we have the subarctic drying out, and that’s increasing fire risk,” said Stephen Peterson, the director of conservation and research with Assiniboine Park Conservancy.
“And where those fires occur where there’s polar bear denning, we have this problem where the fires can impact the quality of that den habitat.”
Much of Petersen’s research is focusing on Wapusk National Park, a core polar bear denning area situated along the shore of the Hudson Bay where the boreal forest ends and the arctic tundra begins.
“Polar bears tend to be on slopes where they have trees and there’s some permafrost structure and they dig in,” Petersen said.
“And when a fire comes through it burns the peat and the trees that give that area structure, (and make) it the perfect denning habitat. So we want to look at where is the overlap between fire risk and polar bear denning.”
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According to the province’s FireView map, there is currently one smaller wildfire burning inside Wapusk National Park. There are a few other fires being monitored south of the Kaskatamagan wildlife management area, a polar bear denning habitat that runs along the Hudson Bay from the mouth of the Nelson River to the Ontario border.
Petersen said the intent of the research is to create a map that can help inform wildfire fighting efforts in the future, to help protect and preserve a species that’s already threatened in Manitoba.
“We’re seeing more fires, they’re burning hotter, and at the same time, we’re getting changes in sea ice,” Petersen said.
“And it looks like the western Hudson Bay (polar bear) population that we have in Manitoba – their population was stable and now it’s declining. So as those fewer bears are looking for places to den, we want those denning places to be intact.”
Petersen adds it’s still largely unknown what the overall impact would be if wildfires do encroach significantly into polar denning territory.
“We don’t really know what the bears are going to do if that happens,” he said. “Some of them might be able to shift their distribution to other places, but others might just waste a lot of energy coming back to the same place, and then being unsuccessful in denning.”
Justina Rayes, the president and senior scientist with Wildlife Conservation Society Canada, says the intensity of the widespread wildfires across the country is having impacts on other northern wildlife, including caribou.
“Caribou are a species that need older forests or larger expanses of older forests, particularly to calve in,” Rayes told Global News.
“So they will be affected by this kind of disturbance that’s happening with this much intensity, right during a period when you’ve got newborn calves struggling to survive in any case.”
Rayes adds it’s hard to know the full extent of what’s happening to wildlife caught up in the wildfires.
“People can’t see it, so we have to imagine what’s happening,” she said. “And it’s cumulative in nature, so while wildlife have lived with fire forever, when it’s this intense, this much expansive of land being affected, then it really becomes too much, and that’s what we have to be concerned about.”
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