Latest news with #StephenPeterson
CTV News
01-08-2025
- Science
- CTV News
Potential impact of wildfires on polar bear denning habitats
A male polar bear walks along the shore of Hudson Bay near Churchill, Manitoba on Monday Aug. 23, 2010. THE CANADIAN PRESS IMAGES/Sean Kilpatrick Some Manitoba researchers are studying the impact that ongoing wildfires could have on polar bears and their denning habitats. Stephen Peterson, the Director of Conservation and Research at Winnipeg's Assiniboine Park Conservancy, has been focusing his research on Wapusk National Park, near Churchill in northern Manitoba. 'We've been working on looking at where polar bear dens are and where they are at high risk of wildfires,' he said. Churchill is considered the polar bear capital of the world, and the Wapusk National Park is one of the largest known polar bear maternity denning areas. It's along the western shores of the Hudson Bay, an area where these animals spend most of their time in the winter. Sea ice is a natural habitat for polar bears. It's where they hunt and mate. When the ice on the Hudson Bay breaks up, the bears come ashore. Female bears, including those that are pregnant, head inland to the denning areas. Due to climate change, however, the amount of time for polar bears to live on the ice is declining. According to Parks Canada, the number of days when sea ice is available has decreased by 25 days since the 1980s. Along with dwindling sea ice, wildfires could also potentially impact polar bear habitat. Peterson warns a warming climate and a drying subarctic landscape are now increasing the fire risk up north, which can reduce the peat and the trees that give structure to the denning habitats. This is placing polar bears in ever-increasing danger. 'If we start eroding and picking away at that denning habitat that is so important for producing new cubs and keeping those populations sustainable, then polar bears are getting another whammy that will make them less likely to be in Manitoba in the long-term,' he said. According to Manitoba's fire map, there is one small active fire in Wapusk National Park, and two other fires in the region. Peterson hopes to build a map that highlights the areas with high-risk fire danger in the north, to help inform wildfire fighting efforts in the future. 'The work that we have been doing is can we figure out where the line is, where we might want to mobilize firefighters in order to manage a fire, so it doesn't destroy critical polar bear denning habitats.' 'The future of polar bears is not great': U of M researcher University of Manitoba professor Meaghan Jones has studied the impact climate change is having on polar bears. In her ongoing study, 'Climate Change, age acceleration, and the erosion of fitness in polar bears,' she and her team are looking at biological aging, which means researching whether these polar bears are aging faster than expected because of the impacts of climate change. Examining tissue samples from polar bears between the early-mid 1980s to 2023, she discovered that for every degree of climate warming, these polar bears along the western shores of the Hudson Bay are aging by one year. She says the climate has warmed three degrees over the last four decades. 'As we are losing ice in the Arctic due to climate change, bears are spending more time swimming, which is five times more energetically intensive than walking. They are using energy faster. They are having to work a lot harder to find mates and food,' she said. 'The oldest bears live to be about 30 years, so aging up to three years over the course of their lifespan, that's a 10 per cent change in the rate of aging over that time,' she said. The study has primarily focused on polar bears on the western side of the Hudson Bay, but now that's being expanded to all polar bears throughout the Canadian Arctic region. Jones is also looking into whether polar bears can adapt to this new climate as the planet continues to warm. 'Climate change is happening at a pace that is unprecedented for our world,' she said. 'We've actually seen very limited evidence for these populations to be able to adapt to the rapid change that we see. We are concerned about the population declines over time.' Jones says the Arctic is expected to continue to warm at this rate for at least another 100 years, even as scientists and researchers, like herself, are mitigating changes right now. 'We are really concerned about this species in the future,' she said.
Global News
15-07-2025
- Science
- Global News
Manitoba researchers look at potential impact of wildfires on polar bear denning habitat
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. View image in full screen Stephen Peterson, the director of conservation and research, points to a map showing the level of wildfire risk near polar bear denning areas. Marney Blunt / Global News 'Polar bears tend to be on slopes where they have trees and there's some permafrost structure and they dig in,' Petersen said. Story continues below advertisement '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.' Get breaking National news For news impacting Canada and around the world, sign up for breaking news alerts delivered directly to you when they happen. Sign up for breaking National newsletter Sign Up By providing your email address, you have read and agree to Global News' Terms and Conditions and Privacy Policy 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. Story continues below advertisement '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.'
