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Good afternoon, and welcome to Globe Climate, a newsletter about climate change, environment and resources in Canada.

White-tailed deer are a crucial species from a conservation and wildlife-management standpoint. Scientists are breaking new ground by following the ultimate boundary crossers across forests, rivers and highways of Ontario. Ivan Semeniuk will tell us more about that research today.

Now, let’s catch you up on other news.

1. Wildfires: B.C. was unprepared to help Lytton rebuild after wildfire, A-G report says
2. Oil and gas: LNG Canada sharply boosts exports to Asia as global supplies tighten
3. Weather: Vancouver set to close out first snow-free winter in 43 years
4. Analysis: The Hormuz crisis instantly exposed the risks of rolling back green and cleantech agendas
5. Sustainable finance: Indigenous program to protect Canadian wilderness aims to bolster First Nations’ economies

Ivan Semeniuk is a science reporter for The Globe and Mail. For this week’s deeper dive, he talks about research to learn about the movement of white-tailed deer.

Biologists know that the warming of Earth’s climate is affecting many wildlife species in different ways. What is harder to figure out is how the climate interacts with other variables to shape the trajectory of an animal population at the genetic level.

That’s exactly the question researchers are asking in a study of white-tailed deer in Eastern Ontario’s Thousand Islands National Park. The park is not a contiguous land area but a series of islands in the St. Lawrence River and properties strung out along the river’s north shore.

Deer are not just plentiful here but “hyperabundant,” which means they are having a significant impact on the local ecology as they consume plants in and around the park. It’s a microcosm of a larger picture in North America as white-tailed deer bounced back from a historic low point at the beginning of the 20th century.

At that time, there were only about 300,000 white-tailed deer left in North America because of harvesting and land clearing. Now their population is estimated to be about 100 times that size. They are now the most abundant large wild animal species on the continent – and a multibillion dollar industry tied to hunting and farming deer.

As the climate warms, deer are moving northward, farther into the boreal forest than before. To understand their movements and what that means for the future, researchers with Trent University and Parks Canada are fitting deer with radio collars and also sampling their DNA.

In my recent story on the project, I explore how these data can help illuminate a range of questions that are relevant to climate, human health and transportation (because deer are frequent highway crossers). What I learned is that while deer are all around us, their silent world is one that we are just beginning to understand. It’s information that we need as we prepare to manage a future for Canada’s wilderness that is likely to be quite different in some ways than the past.

– Ivan

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