Meet an Alberta Wildlife Researcher: Jonathan Backs

Where did you go to school that led to this project?

I completed my schooling at the University of Alberta, starting with my bachelor’s degree in engineering physics. I started my Master of Science in Materials Engineering before switching to the PhD program. I then switched to an interdisciplinary PhD in Materials Engineering and Ecology with Colleen St. Clair (ecology) and John Nychka (materials engineering). Since there was no engineering department dedicated to wildlife behaviour, it was a learning curve to be able to integrate these two fields and tackle the problem I was interested in.

Tell me a brief overview of your project

The project is about keeping wildlife safe from train collisions.

How did you begin to tackle the problem of how to reduce these collisions?

To reduce the number of wildlife–train collisions, we wanted to make it easier for animals to avoid trains. Trains might be difficult for animals to detect under some circumstances, and we thought it might be possible to warn animals in dangerous locations about inbound trains. If a unique signal were presented at a consistent time before every train arrival at a location, we would expect animals to learn an association between the signal and the scary experience of train arrival, and so animals would be encouraged to leave the track when they detected the signal instead of waiting for the train to get close.

Your research focused on trains, how are train collisions with wildlife different than vehicle collisions?

Vehicle collisions on roads are more common and certainly better studied, perhaps because they are more publicly visible and more likely to be dangerous for people. Trains are a different threat because trains generally cannot slow down on the time scales required to avoid wildlife collisions and they can’t swerve to avoid wildlife because they are confined to the tracks.

How common are train collisions with wildlife within Banff?

In Banff, Parks Canada and Canadian Pacific record these collisions and there are on the order of a few dozen wildlife–train collisions with large mammals each year. These are spread across the entire 82 km of the tracks within the park.

What were the main questions your research was trying to answer?

In this project I tried to address two broad questions, the first being why wildlife are vulnerable to train collisions. The second was to see if there was a way to reduce these collisions. In addressing the first question, I focused on train audibility. This was motivated in part by my experiences helping others of Colleen’s students with their work in Banff, when I noticed some trains are harder to hear than others.

What factors lead to different trains being more detectable or louder than others?

We started by examining factors that could cause some trains to be harder to hear for wildlife. This was a challenge because of the complexity of acoustics in a natural setting as well as the complexity of wildlife perception and behaviour. One important aspect might be that train tracks tend to follow topographical contours through Banff to minimize the grade, because trains cannot safely and efficiently climb or descend grades that are too steep. This results in the tracks curving through the landscape. It is well known that earthen berms absorb sound and so I thought that the hills around which the track curves could impact the sound transmission from trains and make them harder to detect. In particular, I hypothesized that trains would be hardest to hear around these curves, especially when the curves are around steep topography. To test this idea, I chose 10 locations at which I measured the audibility of trains approaching from both directions (east and west). Train audibility was measured with rugged outdoor audio recorders. Both curved and straight sections of track were observed and compared to each other. My preliminary results suggest that the audibility of trains approaching from curved and straight track was not different on average, but within each site the audibilities of eastbound and westbound trains can be different. These differences within each site might be due in part to topography.

Are there other factors other than hearing the trains that reduce the detectability of trains?

Considering that animals might be more likely to be hit by trains when they can’t detect the trains early enough, the curves seem likely to add danger not only because trains are harder to hear around some curves, but also because they reduce the distance from which animals can see trains. From a perception perspective, vision and hearing are the only two senses that could be used to detect trains from a distance, as olfactory, taste and touch would be generally unhelpful at the speed trains travel.

You might expect that trains would be consistently loud enough for these issues to be irrelevant, but the audibility of a train regardless of the landscape can also vary depending on its speed and on whether the horn is blown as it approaches a location.

How does the detectability of trains impact the risk of wildlife collisions?

Work by others and anecdotes from the Banff area have shown that wildlife tend to be hit by trains when they run down the tracks away from the approaching train, as they are eventually overtaken by the faster train. This is interesting because for humans, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to behave this way when we know the train is confined to the tracks, but animals seem to lack that understanding. When I observed wildlife reacting to trains in my work, most of the time animals made the safe choice and ran perpendicular from the tracks into cover. I and others have speculated that wildlife are more likely to make the maladaptive choice to run down the tracks when they are surprised by trains. Animals might be more easily surprised by trains that are harder to hear.

This lead to the second part of my project, where I created a warning system that could increase the detectability of trains and so decrease the likelihood of wildlife being surprised by trains.

How did you design your train detection and warning system?

I wanted to design the system with off the shelf parts so that it could be easily built by anyone who wanted to set up their own warning system. Using off the shelf parts also meant a lower cost for parts and assembly, reducing economic barriers to setting up the system. My design was inspired by the train detection and warning systems used at road–rail crossings. However, for safety reasons, I couldn’t risk interfering with the existing railway signaling systems. I tried several different methods for detecting trains that would not interfere with railway signaling, so instead I used off the shelf sensors, and I tested the ability of these sensors to reliably detect trains. Of the sensors I tested, I got the best results using either a digital compass or an accelerometer. These devices could be placed on the outer web of the track rails where they would not be damaged by the train wheels. I then added a radio transmitter so that whenever a train was detected, a radio signal would be sent to turn on the warning signals further along the track. For the warning signals, I chose flashing lights and bell sounds similar to those used at road–rail crossing signals. To accommodate the dichromatic vision of most mammals, I chose to use amber lights instead of red lights. The advantage of this approach is that any wildlife that had prior experience with the road–rail crossings within the park would have a head start on learning, while for other animals this combination of signals ought to be unique in their experience, allowing them to learn a unique association between these signals and the experience of a train passing. My prototype of this system costs $1500 (USD) and protects 200m of track, orders of magnitude less than the sophisticated systems that warn people about trains at road–rail crossings. I designed the warning signals to activate 30 seconds before the train arrives.

Why was 30 seconds chosen?

There were a few reasons why we chose 30 seconds. This was similar to the timing commonly chosen for road–rail crossings, where the literature suggests that 20 seconds is the minimum amount of warning time that pedestrians and motorists can use to keep themselves safe from trains. This was taken into account and tuned from field experience: at 20 seconds away in our study area, you can often hear an approaching train, but less so at 30 seconds. Thus, 30 seconds of warning time ensured that the warning signals were proximate to the train’s arrival for animals, but not so close that wildlife could hear the train before the warning (ensuring the stimuli are experienced in the correct order).

What are some possible limitations of this design?

During my acoustic study, I noticed (as others have reported in the literature) that trains create a wide range of ultrasonic to infrasonic sound. I was able to measure ultrasonic noise produced by trains up to 80 kHz and above, which is as high as the equipment I used could measure. Importantly, these ultrasonic sounds were sometimes detected by the recording equipment well before sounds within the human hearing range were detected. Many large mammals can hear into the ultrasonic range, and so this ultrasonic sound may affect how animals respond to a warning signal provided at 30 seconds before train arrival.

What was the next step after designing the train detection and warning system?

The next step of my project was to test the train detection and warning system. The system was set up in Banff, where I also placed remote cameras to record wildlife reacting to trains with and without the warning system turned on. For this test I chose four locations in the park using a historical dataset from Parks Canada of wildlife-train collisions over the last 40 years. The warning signals were exchanged between pairs of sites every three weeks to account for seasonal effects. A total of 1.6 million photos were taken during the experiment. With help from many volunteers, we sorted through all of the images to find images with animals present. I then looked at all of the animal sequences to quantify their responses to the trains, essentially when they began to move off of the tracks and when the train crossed the spot where they left. I called this time interval the flight initiation time and this was compared between trials where the warning system was active and inactive.

What were the results of your research?

Our preliminary results suggest that animals coyote and larger left the track 6.5 seconds earlier with the warning system active versus the system being inactive. This is a great deal of extra time when you consider that animals need only travel a short distance from the track to avoid being hit. For the train speeds common within our study area, this equates to an extra 100 m of separation between the animal and the approaching train. Although we did not observe any collisions during our study, we anticipate this extra time and space could be used by animals to reduce their likelihood of being hit by a train.

What do you see as the next steps for this research?

A next step could be to deploy the warning system at wildlife collision hotspots for a longer period of time. This would give us more insight into whether the technology can reduce collisions. With some more work, this system could potentially be used to reduce the impact of wildlife collision hotspots in other jurisdictions around the world.

It would be ideal to measure if animals are learning that the warning system indicates a train is on its way. But to do this, we would need to observe the same animal react multiple times to the system, which is challenging because we would need a way to control how wild animals interacted with our test sites and a way to identify individual animals.

Your research is based specifically in Banff, do you think it could be applied elsewhere? If so, where?

This technology can, in principle, be used anywhere that wildlife and trains may come into contact. It would be interesting to test this technology in India where endangered Asian elephants are hit by trains.

This research was funded by the Joint Initiative for Grizzly Bear Conservation of Parks Canada and Canadian Pacific, NSERC, the Alberta Conservation Association (ACA), Alberta Innovates and the University of Alberta.

Meet a Wildlifer: Meet the New ED

Interview with Dr. Sarah Emeligi

What’s your favourite Alberta species?

As a bear biologist, I am pretty partial to grizzly bears. The more I work with bears, the more amazing I think they are.

Where did you go to school?

I completed my undergraduate degree at the University of Alberta, my masters at University of Northern BC and my PhD at Central Queensland University in Australia.

Can you give a quick overview of your career?

I punctuated my education with 5 years of working and traveling between degrees. After my undergrad, I worked as a science educator at the Royal Tyrell Museum and travelled a bit. After my masters, I spent a few years working in the environmental non-profit sector in Alberta, including Y2Y and CPAWS, advocating for the use of science in landscape decision making and regional planning. With this work, I helped get grizzly bears listed as threatened under the Alberta Wildlife Act and worked on the Castle Provincial park Campaign. I then completed my PhD and began working as a planner with Alberta Parks in Kananaskis. I now run my own consulting company out of Canmore.

What are your career highlights?

There are 4 big highlights for me:

The first highlight is that recommendations from my master’s thesis led to bear viewings guidelines in BC.

The second would be working with a lot of great people to get grizzly bears listed as threatened in Alberta in 2010.

The third was working with a lot of dedicated people to eventually get the Castle Provincial parks designated

And the fourth is going to sound lame, but it was completing my PhD (editor note: PhDs are not lame) because of how hard it was. I am still working on getting the publications out.

What interested you in working in wildlife?

I have always been drawn to animals and nature since I was a child. I was interested in understanding animal behaviour because they can’t communicate like we do. Understanding animal behaviour requires thinking outside of your instinctual communication methods and opening yourself up to how another species perceives the world and communicates. I love the creativity and science that goes into that. There are so many ways that animals communicate, because they use every single one of their senses. And as humans, we view communicating as speech and hearing, whereas animals have a really attuned communication system. For example, grizzly bears can communicate across habitats without ever seeing each other. They leave scents or mark trees to have conversations across the landscape, even when they aren’t in the same place at the same time.

What research did you do for your PhD?

Both my masters and PhD applied an interdisciplinary approach to grizzly bear-human interactions in the same landscape. In parks and protected areas, we need to look at ecological and social science together to define some really cool and meaningful management recommendations. In my PhD, I looked at grizzly bears and human trail use in Banff, Jasper, Kootenay and Yoho National Parks. The basis of my question was how grizzly bears selected habitat around human used trails within the parks. I looked at grizzly bear habitat selection and trail use by using remote cameras and GPS collars. I also had a component of surveying trail users to understand their expectations of grizzly bear management within the parks. The resulting management recommendations were designed to make a satisfactory trail visitor experience and meet grizzly bear habitat within Canada’s busiest national parks.

What’s the biggest change you have noticed since starting your career?

The biggest change is the diversity around what it means to be a biologist. When I first started my undergraduate degree, I used to think a biologist did research and published research. But as I moved through my career, I saw a bigger range in what they can be. Biologists are academics, independent consultants, industry professionals and more. The definition of being a wildlife biologist has changed as the needs have changed. This diversity has been great because it’s led to a bigger diversity in questions being asked. Instead of asking species specific questions, we start looking at ecosystem management and integrating human dimensions into our ecological research so that we have the whole picture. The diversity of questions has led to diversity in the scale of questions, instead of smaller spatial scales, we look at landscape or even global scales. This diversity in science is reflected into our everyday work and has led to more people getting into biological sciences, especially women and people from other countries. Every conference I go to, I am overwhelmed with the diversity in subject matter and people and cultures. This changes what it means to be a biologist and what it takes to conduct biological related research. I could not have predicted how diverse we would become as a group of dedicated biologists and conservationists and I love how it has changed our field for the better.

(For an excellent read about the growing diversity in wildlife, check out David Frey's article about TWS Out in the Field LGBTQ+ Visibility Lunch Social at last year's TWS conference.)

Where do you see your work in the future?

I don’t know because as the field of conservation biology expands and diversifies, it’s hard to predict the diversity of the possibilities. I know I will always be working to protect Alberta Wildlife and making sure robust science is included in decision making because that’s who I am. When I retire, I want to know that each stage of my career contributed to recovering Alberta’s grizzly bear population, but there are a hundred different ways I can do that. I look forward to exploring my future with the same curiosity and passion I had when I graduated high school..

Who was a mentor or famous biologist who helped shape your career?

As a kid, I admired Jane Goodall and Diane Fossey, I loved the relationship they developed with chimps and gorillas and how they were able to learn so much from their behaviours. For mentors, it’s going to sound cheesy, but both my masters and PhD committees were amazing. My supervisors inspired me, challenged me and helped me become a better biologist and scientist.

Where’s your favourite place to visit in Alberta?

I love all of Alberta. I was born and raised here. I love the diversity of the landscapes, ecosystems and communities. It is not the same from the aspen parkland to the boreal to the grasslands to the foothills or the mountains. It’s so different from landscape to landscape and community to community. The diversity of Alberta is where our true strength is. Every square inch of the province is unique.

Do you have any advice for students and young wildlifers you wish you’d known when you started?

My advice for students and young wildlifers is to follow your passion in wildlife biology and to allow it to motivate you when the times are hard. There will always be people you encounter throughout your career who want to see you fail or who want to compete with you based on their own ego’s needs. Focus on the wise words of your supporters and don’t lose your passion. During the hard times, it is your passion that will fuel you and move you forward. Let the naysayers be damned! You do you and be the best wildlife biologist you can be!

Book Review: Biodiversity Conservation in Canada – From Theory to Practice By Richard R. Schneider

Review by Ludwig Carbyn

Dr. Schneider’s new book provides an important contribution to the practice of biodiversity conservation in Canada. Not only does Schneider supply a comprehensive and authoritative overview of conservation theory, he also builds a bridge between conservation principles and their application in real-world settings. Written in a clear and engaging style and brimming with full-colour figures and illustrative case studies, his book explains how conservation decision making is informed by science, shaped by social and political context, and embedded in a complex set of institutions. The subject is exceptionally well dealt with.

Another welcome feature of the book is that it is focused specifically on Canada, which is a first in this field. The consideration of local circumstances is what permits Schneider to delve into the practical aspects of conservation. The types of threats matter; the existing laws and policies matter; institutions matter; the values and concerns of local people matter; history matters; and so on. In short, how conservation is done depends on where it is done. By incorporating these aspects, Schneider delivers a synthesis tailored to the needs of conservation practitioners in Canada.

The first section of the book introduces the social and scientific context of conservation, setting the stage for the applied chapters that follow. In these initial chapters, we learn the “what” and “why” of conservation. Subsequent chapters are devoted to the practice of conservation at both the species and ecosystem level. In these chapters, we learn the “how” of conservation and gain an understanding of how theory and practice are linked together. We also gain insight into the role of conservation practitioners in the overall enterprise of conservation. A dedicated chapter on climate change explores the expected effects of progressive warming on Canada’s ecosystems and what these changes mean for conservation. There is also a chapter on structured decision making, a topic of central importance to effective conservation. Finally, the book presents a sequence of six case studies that illustrate the complexities of real-world conservation and provide additional insight into how conservation theory is translated into practice.

Dr. Schneider intends this book to be used as a vehicle for teaching. For undergraduates, it is meant to expose future practitioners to a broad overview of both the scientific and social dimensions of conservation. For graduate students, the book is a way of moving from theoretical information obtained in classes to dealing, in a practical and meaningful way, with real world conservation problems. For readers with a professional or personal interest in conservation, this book will provide an accessible guide to state-of-the-art conservation science and its current application in Canada.

It occurred to me that much in this book could also be applied to high school curricula. In the very least, a copy could well be placed in every high school library in our country. I found the chapter on “The Historical Foundations of Conservation in Canada “ particularly interesting. Many young Canadians have little exposure or knowledge about such important events of the past such as the fur trade in the 19th century and how it influenced Canadian history .

I also enjoyed the book’s treatment of difficult and controversial topics within the field of conservation. For example, the book explores the fundamental goals of conservation, the question of how much conservation is enough, the concept of conservation triage, scientists as advocates, and the meaning of conservation in a world that is fundamentally changing because of global warming. Rather than simply presenting his own point of view, Schneider provides a thorough account of the alternative perspectives on each topic.

This book represents applied biology at its best. In essence, it outlines logical approaches to finding solutions to complex problems. It has a practical, “no nonsense” approach that I found highly compelling. Conservation practitioners, conservation organizations, government scientists, academicians, and people in all walks of life with an interest of our natural world, can get a great deal out of this book. I highly recommend it.

Additional information about Biodiversity Conservation in Canada – From Theory to Practice can be found at www.ccte.ca. Copies are available at Amazon.ca for $59.50.

The Snow Goose Festival is Back

The Snow Goose Festival is back for 2020 for April 25 and 26. The first iteration of the festival ran from 1993 until 2002 and was one of the first events of its kind in North America. It's return has been partially due to higher water levels in Beaverhill Lake and due to devoted volunteers.

Canadian Wildlife Services Public Consultations

The Canadian Wildlife Services launched a public consultations on proposed changes to the migratory bird game bird hunting regulations in Canada for the next two hunting seasons.

The main change proposed in Alberta is to simplify the hunting zones, going from 8 zones down to 2 zones.