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2023 Wildsight Winter Speaker Series: The Grizzly Bear at Home
January 12, Online
Wildsight Golden’s 2023 Winter Speaker Series has the theme “Creatures Great and Small”. Join Cat Cowen for “The Grizzly Bear at Home: An Inside Glimpse on Bear Behavior and Conservation in Interior Mountain Ecosystems”. Having started her journey gearing towards veterinary sciences, Cat Cowan’s plans changed upon meeting grizzly bears in Banff in 2011. Since then, Cat has focused her career on bears and has had many unique opportunities – both in wild and captive environments – giving her a unique perspective on bear behavior, their environment, needs, drivers, the role they play on the landscape, and the ever changing relationship between bears and people. Cat is currently the Manager of the Kicking Horse Grizzly Bear Refuge and has been overlooking the wellbeing of Boo, Kicking Horse’s resident grizzly bear, since 2016. From 7 – 8 pm MT.
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Reconciliation and Organizational Change within eNGOs
January 17, Online
A Panel Discussion Featuring Nature United, the Nature Conservancy of Canada, and Sierra Club BC. In recent years, many environmental organizations have identified Indigenous-led conservation and reconciliation as priorities. True reconciliation, however, will require organizations to critically reflect on their past and current approaches and assumptions, understand and learn from the historical and ongoing harms of colonial conservation, and take genuine and concrete actions for change. The panel will outline key principles for organizational change initiatives within environmental non-governmental organizations (ENGOs) to support and create space for Indigenous voices, knowledge systems, laws, rights, and responsibilities.
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How the past haunts our future: Colonization and the loss of dry forest resilience in the southern Rocky Mountain Trench of British Columbia
January 26, Online
Catastrophic wildfires and “smoke seasons” are becoming common features of life in western North America. Unfortunately, historical dry forest structures, and the specific factors that changed them, have never been reconstructed in British Columbia. These knowledge gaps hinder our ability to determine both the magnitude and implications of forest change. In this talk, Greg uses tree-ring evidence to reconstruct historical fire regimes and structures of dry forests in the southern Rocky Mountain Trench of BC. He describes how these forests interacted with fires historically, how colonization altered forests and fire regimes, and what the implications of these changes are for forest resilience. Presenter: Gregory Greene, PhD, University of British Columbia. From 12 pm to 1 pm PT / 1 pm to 2 pm MT.
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2023 Wildsight Winter Speaker Series: Wolverines in a changing landscape and warming climate
January 26, Online
Mirjam Barrueto is a wolverine researcher, PhD student, conservation biologist, climber, ultra-runner and back-country skier. As a child, wildlife and nature documentaries inspired her to become an adventurer and biologist. As a wildlife researcher she is passionate about exploring creative ways to make scientific research accessible to a broad audience, and to inspire others to get interested and involved in conservation themselves. Mirjam is going to share her latest research about the fascinating opportunities and challenges faced by this top predator living at the top of the world. From 7 – 8 pm MT.
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Climate Change & Sustainability Education Resources
January 31, Online
Join Ian Shanahan & Sam Levac-Levey for this CBEEN workshop to learn about some fantastic resources for educating, engaging, and empowering students around climate change and sustainability education. Sam is the developer of the Solutions, a board game to inform and inspire hope and action for the climate. Ian is the Editor of Green Teacher, a world-renowned organization that has published hundreds of practical examples, activities, and lesson plans from teachers who are making a difference in their classrooms and communities. Starts at 4 p.m. PT.
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Four Fifths a Grizzly Book Tour
February 7-14, Invermere • Golden • Revelstoke • Nelson • Creston • Kimberley • Fernie
Join acclaimed author, naturalist and biologist Douglas Chadwick on a Kootenays book tour this February hosted by Wildsight. In his latest book, Four Fifths a Grizzly, Douglas explores humans’ place in the natural world, beginning with the close relationship between humans and grizzly bears, and expanding to look at our DNA in comparison to salmon, insects, even a wine grape. He challenges the preconception that we are separate from nature.
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Emerging Landscape Novelty
February 9, Online
The development of the concept of novel ecosystems and the more general concept of ecological novelty acknowledge that non-analogue ecosystems are forming because of shifts in composition, pattern and function. The ecosystem scale has received the most attention, but recent work suggests novelty occurs at a landscape level and is not simply a scaled up version of novel ecosystems. We examine whether resilience is the most effective concept to cope with increasing novelty. After all, restoration ecologists spend much of their time fighting against highly resilient “stuck” ecosystems. Instead, we explore whether adaptive capacity is better suited the task of supporting rapidly changing ecosystems and dependent human relationships. Presenters: Eric Higgs, School of Environmental Studies, University of Victoria; and Jeanine Rhemtulla, Associate Professor, Dept. Forest & Conservation Sciences, University of British Columbia. From 12 pm to 1 pm PT / 1 pm to 2 pm MT.
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Re-introducing fire as a process: Restoring disrupted fire regimes across landscapes
February 16, Online
Through science-based management interventions, we can facilitate re-entry of fire to the ecosystem and maintain its stabilizing feedbacks to the broader landscape. Managing fuels, protecting people and infrastructure, and restoring ecosystems will require broadly applied thinning and fuel reduction, prescribed and cultural burning, and managed wildfire treatments. Integrated landscape planning will be needed to address both the effects of the status quo (i.e., continued fire suppression) and of actions taken to return fire as a stabilizing ecosystem process. The extent of fire regime disruption warrants significant management and policy attention to alter the current trajectory and facilitate better co-existence with wildfire throughout this century. Presenter: Jen Baron, PhD Candidate, University of British Columbia. From 12 pm to 1 pm PT / 1 pm to 2 pm MT.
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Prescribed Fire and Adapting for Resilient Futures
February 23, Online
Climate change, combined with current and past resource management, is increasing wildfire size and severity, jeopardizing the resiliency of forest and grassland ecosystems in the Columbia Mountains region. Prescribed fire, alone or in tandem with a suite of other mitigation strategies, is an integral tool used to improve ecosystem resilience. In our presentation we will describe what goes into prescribed fire planning, how prescribed burns are conducted, how we measure success with prescribed burns, and specifically how prescribed burns can be used in carbon emissions mitigation. Presenters: Robert W. Gray, Wildland Fire Ecologist; Colleen Ross, Wildland Fire Ecologist; Kiah Allen, Unit crew leader with BC Wildfire Service; and Dr. Carley Phillips, Pacific Institute for Climate Solutions at the University of Victoria. From 12 pm to 1 pm PT / 1 pm to 2 pm MT.
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Salish Fire Keepers
TBD, Online (Date to be confirmed)
Joe Gilchrist is a Traditional Fire Keeper in the interior region of BC (Secwepemc and Nlaka’pamux Nations) with over two decades of experience in cultural burning revitalization and wildland fire prevention training. Joe is a Traditional Fire Keeper and Peer Reviewer for the Giving Voice to Cultural Safety of Indigenous Wildland Firefighters in Canada Project. Joe's talk description will be posted soon. Presenter: Joe Gilchrist, Fire Keeper, Turtle Island Consulting (TIC), Salish Fire Keepers. From 12 pm to 1 pm PT / 1 pm to 2 pm MT.
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Climate adaptation in action in the Harrop-Procter Community Forest
March 9, Online
Climate change projections and risks have been widely discussed in broad terms for many years, but climate change adaptation principles have generally been poorly integrated into operational forest management decision-making. Real world examples of systematic climate change adaptation efforts in the forestry sector are sparse. This presentation provides a case study that demonstrates how to integrate climate science and risk assessment into tangible forest management decision-making on a 11,300 hectare community forest on the West Arm of Kootenay Lake. The case study has an applied and practical focus that is oriented towards forest managers and decision makers. Presenter: Erik Leslie, RPF, Forest Manager, Harrop-Procter Community Co-operative. From 12 pm to 1 pm PT / 1 pm to 2 pm MT.
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Tales of taking evidence through to conservation action for two iconic mountain dwellers: caribou and grizzly bear
March 16, Online
Clayton will dive into decades of research on grizzly bears and caribou in British Columbia and provide two emerging examples of conservation success for these species. For caribou, the success focuses on the Indigenous-led recovery of the Klinse-Za caribou which have more than tripled in abundance due to actions by West Moberly and Saulteau First Nations. The second, grizzly bear, will focus not on promoting abundance but rather on coexistence between people and abundant grizzly bear populations in southeast BC—a uniquely abundant population of bears surrounded by threatened grizzly bears in Alberta and the US. Presenter: Clayton Lamb, Wildlife Scientist, Biodiversity Pathways, Universities of British Columbia & Montana. From 12 pm to 1 pm PT / 1 pm to 2 pm MT.
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National Outdoor Learning Conference
May 4-6, 2023, Banff
The Columbia Basin Environmental Education Network and their non-profit Outdoor Learning Store is partnering with EECOM and Take Me Outside to host the first ever National Outdoor Learning Conference. The overarching theme for the 2023 Outdoor Learning Conference is “Place and Pedagogy: Where Learning Happens”. This inaugural Conference will focus on Indigenous Ways of Knowing, Health and Wellbeing and Environmental and Climate Change Education. Registration is now open.
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Responsible Recreation: Pathways, Practices and Possibilities - Call for proposals now open!
May 9-10, 2023, Revelstoke
CMI Recreation and adventure tourism opportunities and activities are expanding globally, with the Columbia Mountains region being no exception. This two-day hybrid CMI conference taking place May 9-10, 2023 in Revelstoke and online is timely as an increasing number of people are pursuing outdoor activities, and there is growing recognition of the limited information, tools, and resources for managing and monitoring the impacts of these pressures on wildlife and habitat. It will be an excellent opportunity for scientists, managers, business operators, students, and the interested public to network and learn about current thinking on increasing outdoor recreation activities and the effect on wildlife and ecosystems. The event will address key questions regarding effects of current and future development and showcase best practices of established commercial and community managed recreation and adventure tourism tenures.
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