FOCUS AREA |

WILDLIFE

Adapting to changing environments.

COMPLETED PROJECTS

Comparing Historic And Current Cervid Population Estimates

Rhiannon Kirton • Shuswap Nation Territory, British Columbia • 2021

Deer, elk and moose are culturally important to First Nations in Shuswap Nation territory, but gaps in historical monitoring have limited understanding of how their populations are changing.

Working alongside the Shuswap Band, Rhiannon Kirton deployed 100 trail cameras across two study areas, capturing nearly 100,000 images and establishing a new baseline for future elk monitoring and management.

Ryan Tidman • British Columbia • 2022

On Vancouver Island, black bears rely on massive hollow old-growth trees for winter shelter, but many of these natural dens are disappearing.

Over three years, Ryan Tidman and bear biologist Helen Davis followed bears and their dens through photography, video and remote cameras. His visual story, Stolen Slumber, reveals a lesser-known consequence of old-growth logging: the loss of the trees bears depend on during the island’s wet coastal winters.

  • Documented logging in Quatsino Sound linked to government mapping errors

    Identified one of British Columbia’s largest Sitka spruce trees

    Captured rare before-and-after imagery of old-growth forest loss

    Recorded the scale and pace of clear-cutting across vulnerable ecosystems

Showcasing Wildlife Corridors In The Northeast

Kateri Monticone • Ontario, Quebec, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick • 2022

  • Documented logging in Quatsino Sound linked to government mapping errors

    Identified one of British Columbia’s largest Sitka spruce trees

    Captured rare before-and-after imagery of old-growth forest loss

    Recorded the scale and pace of clear-cutting across vulnerable ecosystems

  • Images supported public awareness campaigns across British Columbia

    Work contributed to advocacy tied to the province’s 30x30 conservation commitment

    Helped strengthen support for Indigenous Protected and Conserved Areas (IPCAs)

    Photography continues to inform conservation planning and policy discussions

Roads, development and other barriers are breaking wildlife habitat into smaller, disconnected pieces.

For the six-part documentary series CORRIDORS, Kateri Monticone travelled across eastern Canada to document efforts to reconnect these landscapes. Created with the Nature Conservancy of Canada, the films show how communities and conservation groups are rebuilding pathways that help wildlife move between habitats and adapt to climate change.

  • Images supported public awareness campaigns across British Columbia

    Work contributed to advocacy tied to the province’s 30x30 conservation commitment

    Helped strengthen support for Indigenous Protected and Conserved Areas (IPCAs)

    Photography continues to inform conservation planning and policy discussions

The Impacts Of Old-Growth Logging On Vancouver Island Black Bears

  • Documented logging in Quatsino Sound linked to government mapping errors

    Identified one of British Columbia’s largest Sitka spruce trees

    Captured rare before-and-after imagery of old-growth forest loss

    Recorded the scale and pace of clear-cutting across vulnerable ecosystems

Direct Effects of Global Heating and Heat Waves on Temperate Zone Bats

Zenon Czenze • British Columbia • 2022

Extreme heat is creating new survival challenges for bats in British Columbia.

Around Lillooet, one of the province’s hottest regions, Zenon Czenze studied how bats cope with rising temperatures and what happens when their roosts become dangerously hot. Published in the Journal of Experimental Biology, his research revealed the risks of overheating bat boxes and how better design and placement can reduce them.

  • Documented logging in Quatsino Sound linked to government mapping errors

    Identified one of British Columbia’s largest Sitka spruce trees

    Captured rare before-and-after imagery of old-growth forest loss

    Recorded the scale and pace of clear-cutting across vulnerable ecosystems

  • Images supported public awareness campaigns across British Columbia

    Work contributed to advocacy tied to the province’s 30x30 conservation commitment

    Helped strengthen support for Indigenous Protected and Conserved Areas (IPCAs)

    Photography continues to inform conservation planning and policy discussions

  • Images supported public awareness campaigns across British Columbia

    Work contributed to advocacy tied to the province’s 30x30 conservation commitment

    Helped strengthen support for Indigenous Protected and Conserved Areas (IPCAs)

    Photography continues to inform conservation planning and policy discussions

Combatting Trace Element Deficiencies in Muskoxen in a Changing Arctic

Susan Kutz • Nunavut • 2023

Muskoxen are vital to Arctic ecosystems and northern communities, but some populations are declining.

On Somerset and Victoria Islands, Susan Kutz and her team studied muskox hair, plants and soils for clues to animal health. Their research tested whether trace minerals such as selenium and copper could reveal population changes before traditional surveys can.

  • Documented logging in Quatsino Sound linked to government mapping errors

    Identified one of British Columbia’s largest Sitka spruce trees

    Captured rare before-and-after imagery of old-growth forest loss

    Recorded the scale and pace of clear-cutting across vulnerable ecosystems

Beneath The Ice: A First Look At The Endangered St. Lawrence Beluga Whales In Their Winter Habitat

Camille Martel • St. Lawrence River • 2023

Winter remains one of the least understood chapters in the lives of St. Lawrence belugas.

Filmmaker Camille Martel led the first expedition dedicated to filming this endangered population in its winter habitat. Her 30-minute documentary, Beneath the Ice, follows the search to understand where belugas go in winter and why this little-known season may matter to their recovery.

  • Documented logging in Quatsino Sound linked to government mapping errors

    Identified one of British Columbia’s largest Sitka spruce trees

    Captured rare before-and-after imagery of old-growth forest loss

    Recorded the scale and pace of clear-cutting across vulnerable ecosystems

  • Images supported public awareness campaigns across British Columbia

    Work contributed to advocacy tied to the province’s 30x30 conservation commitment

    Helped strengthen support for Indigenous Protected and Conserved Areas (IPCAs)

    Photography continues to inform conservation planning and policy discussions

  • Images supported public awareness campaigns across British Columbia

    Work contributed to advocacy tied to the province’s 30x30 conservation commitment

    Helped strengthen support for Indigenous Protected and Conserved Areas (IPCAs)

    Photography continues to inform conservation planning and policy discussions

Atlantic Salmon: The Fight to Survive

Nick Hawkins • Atlantic Canada, Quebec • 2024

Atlantic salmon make an extraordinary migration, travelling from eastern Canadian rivers to feeding grounds off Greenland before returning to the rivers where their lives began.

Over three years, Nick Hawkins documented that journey from birth to return, creating an unprecedented visual record of the Atlantic salmon’s complete life cycle. His footage captures both the resilience of wild salmon and the mounting pressures they face in rivers and at sea.

  • Documented logging in Quatsino Sound linked to government mapping errors

    Identified one of British Columbia’s largest Sitka spruce trees

    Captured rare before-and-after imagery of old-growth forest loss

    Recorded the scale and pace of clear-cutting across vulnerable ecosystems

  • Images supported public awareness campaigns across British Columbia

    Work contributed to advocacy tied to the province’s 30x30 conservation commitment

    Helped strengthen support for Indigenous Protected and Conserved Areas (IPCAs)

    Photography continues to inform conservation planning and policy discussions

ACTIVE PROJECTS

Walking with Caribou

Malkolm Boothroyd • Yukon • 2023

A century ago, the Fortymile caribou herd numbered around a quarter million animals. By the 1970s, fewer than 10,000 remained.

Now the herd has made a remarkable recovery. Working with Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in community members, Malkolm Boothroyd is following the renewal of relationships with a herd returning to a landscape reshaped by climate change and development.

Scott Parent • Lake Huron • 2024

Plastic is reaching some of Lake Huron’s most remote islands, turning up in waterbird nests and even inside the birds themselves.

In his short documentary Oiseaux, Scott Parent follows cormorants and other waterbirds to explore how human-made debris enters freshwater ecosystems and what these birds can reveal about the health of the waters beneath them.

  • Documented logging in Quatsino Sound linked to government mapping errors

    Identified one of British Columbia’s largest Sitka spruce trees

    Captured rare before-and-after imagery of old-growth forest loss

    Recorded the scale and pace of clear-cutting across vulnerable ecosystems

  • Images supported public awareness campaigns across British Columbia

    Work contributed to advocacy tied to the province’s 30x30 conservation commitment

    Helped strengthen support for Indigenous Protected and Conserved Areas (IPCAs)

    Photography continues to inform conservation planning and policy discussions

Oiseaux - How Anthropogenic debris is be-fowling the Great Lakes and infiltrating the food web.

  • Documented logging in Quatsino Sound linked to government mapping errors

    Identified one of British Columbia’s largest Sitka spruce trees

    Captured rare before-and-after imagery of old-growth forest loss

    Recorded the scale and pace of clear-cutting across vulnerable ecosystems

  • Images supported public awareness campaigns across British Columbia

    Work contributed to advocacy tied to the province’s 30x30 conservation commitment

    Helped strengthen support for Indigenous Protected and Conserved Areas (IPCAs)

    Photography continues to inform conservation planning and policy discussions

Sara Cannon • Pacific Coast • 2024

Pacific salmon can travel thousands of kilometres across rivers, oceans and international borders, encountering fisheries far from the waters where they were born.

Sara Cannon and the First Nations Fisheries Council are tracing how mixed-stock marine fisheries affect sockeye and Chinook salmon from British Columbia and the Yukon, and what those losses mean for First Nations that depend on them.

  • Documented logging in Quatsino Sound linked to government mapping errors

    Identified one of British Columbia’s largest Sitka spruce trees

    Captured rare before-and-after imagery of old-growth forest loss

    Recorded the scale and pace of clear-cutting across vulnerable ecosystems

Southern Bears

Mitch Bowmile • James Bay • 2025

  • Documented logging in Quatsino Sound linked to government mapping errors

    Identified one of British Columbia’s largest Sitka spruce trees

    Captured rare before-and-after imagery of old-growth forest loss

    Recorded the scale and pace of clear-cutting across vulnerable ecosystems

  • Images supported public awareness campaigns across British Columbia

    Work contributed to advocacy tied to the province’s 30x30 conservation commitment

    Helped strengthen support for Indigenous Protected and Conserved Areas (IPCAs)

    Photography continues to inform conservation planning and policy discussions

Along the eastern coast of James Bay, Cree land-users are encountering more polar bears on offshore islands used for hunting and trapping.

Southern Bears follows Cree field teams and researchers using hair snares and camera traps to study the world’s southernmost polar bears without handling them, gathering new evidence about these little-studied bears and what it could mean for their future in James Bay.

  • Images supported public awareness campaigns across British Columbia

    Work contributed to advocacy tied to the province’s 30x30 conservation commitment

    Helped strengthen support for Indigenous Protected and Conserved Areas (IPCAs)

    Photography continues to inform conservation planning and policy discussions

Towards social justice and sustainability in Canadian salmon fisheries

Shorebirds: Sentinels Of The Mudflats

Isabelle Groc • Pacific & Atlantic Flyways • 2024

A bird weighing little more than 30 grams can migrate more than 10,000 kilometres, stopping at just a handful of mudflats to refuel.

Along the Pacific and Atlantic flyways, Isabelle Groc is following western and semipalmated sandpipers to reveal the hidden importance of these overlooked habitats. Her documentary Sandpipers’ Last Supper tells the story of western sandpipers at Roberts Bank, where nutrient-rich biofilm helps fuel their extraordinary migration.

  • Documented logging in Quatsino Sound linked to government mapping errors

    Identified one of British Columbia’s largest Sitka spruce trees

    Captured rare before-and-after imagery of old-growth forest loss

    Recorded the scale and pace of clear-cutting across vulnerable ecosystems

  • Images supported public awareness campaigns across British Columbia

    Work contributed to advocacy tied to the province’s 30x30 conservation commitment

    Helped strengthen support for Indigenous Protected and Conserved Areas (IPCAs)

    Photography continues to inform conservation planning and policy discussions

Investigating Wild Salmon Health in Relation to
Heat Stress from Logging

Robert Masaki Hechler • Coastal British Columbia • 2025

Logging can warm the rivers where Pacific salmon spawn and grow, but its effects on wild salmon health remain poorly understood.

Across 10 rivers with different logging histories and temperatures, Robert Masaki Hechler and the Musgamagw Dzawada’enuxw Fisheries Group are studying how coho salmon respond to warmer water. The team is also testing whether environmental RNA can reveal signs of heat stress without catching the fish.

Ryan Tidman • British Columbia • 2025

Fewer than 30 Vancouver Island marmots remained in the wild in the early 2000s. After more than two decades of intensive recovery work, their numbers have climbed into the hundreds.

Ryan Tidman’s short documentary Rise of the Marmot follows a young captive-born marmot released into a formerly abandoned colony, revealing the science and fieldwork behind the recovery of one of the world’s rarest mammals.

  • Documented logging in Quatsino Sound linked to government mapping errors

    Identified one of British Columbia’s largest Sitka spruce trees

    Captured rare before-and-after imagery of old-growth forest loss

    Recorded the scale and pace of clear-cutting across vulnerable ecosystems

Open Video Library of Canadian Microorganisms

Ariel Waldman • Across Canada • 2025

  • Documented logging in Quatsino Sound linked to government mapping errors

    Identified one of British Columbia’s largest Sitka spruce trees

    Captured rare before-and-after imagery of old-growth forest loss

    Recorded the scale and pace of clear-cutting across vulnerable ecosystems

  • Images supported public awareness campaigns across British Columbia

    Work contributed to advocacy tied to the province’s 30x30 conservation commitment

    Helped strengthen support for Indigenous Protected and Conserved Areas (IPCAs)

    Photography continues to inform conservation planning and policy discussions

Entire worlds can exist within a drop of water, yet much of Canada’s microbial life remains unseen.

Working with environmental microbiologist Jackie Goordial at the University of Guelph, Ariel Waldman is filming living microorganisms collected from the Canadian Arctic, revealing how they move and behave under the microscope. The footage will become a free video library, opening a window onto the tiny organisms that help sustain ecosystems.

  • Images supported public awareness campaigns across British Columbia

    Work contributed to advocacy tied to the province’s 30x30 conservation commitment

    Helped strengthen support for Indigenous Protected and Conserved Areas (IPCAs)

    Photography continues to inform conservation planning and policy discussions

Rise of the Marmot

  • Documented logging in Quatsino Sound linked to government mapping errors

    Identified one of British Columbia’s largest Sitka spruce trees

    Captured rare before-and-after imagery of old-growth forest loss

    Recorded the scale and pace of clear-cutting across vulnerable ecosystems

Road to Recovery: Protecting Ontario’s Freshwater Turtles
From Car Strikes

Samantha Stephens • Ontario • 2025

For Ontario’s freshwater turtles, crossing a road can be deadly. Because turtles mature slowly and reproduce over decades, losing even one breeding female can have lasting consequences for a population.

Where roads cut through turtle habitat, Samantha Stephens is following the people working to make those crossings safer, from wildlife fencing to rescue and rehabilitation.

  • Documented logging in Quatsino Sound linked to government mapping errors

    Identified one of British Columbia’s largest Sitka spruce trees

    Captured rare before-and-after imagery of old-growth forest loss

    Recorded the scale and pace of clear-cutting across vulnerable ecosystems

  • Images supported public awareness campaigns across British Columbia

    Work contributed to advocacy tied to the province’s 30x30 conservation commitment

    Helped strengthen support for Indigenous Protected and Conserved Areas (IPCAs)

    Photography continues to inform conservation planning and policy discussions

  • Images supported public awareness campaigns across British Columbia

    Work contributed to advocacy tied to the province’s 30x30 conservation commitment

    Helped strengthen support for Indigenous Protected and Conserved Areas (IPCAs)

    Photography continues to inform conservation planning and policy discussions

Valeria Vergara • Vancouver Island, BC • 2026

Killer whales live in societies held together by sound. Among Northern Resident killer whales, each pod has its own dialect, passed down through generations.

Underwater recordings, drone footage, and artificial intelligence are being combined to link specific calls to the behaviours and social interactions happening around them. Valeria Vergara is also comparing Northern Resident and Bigg’s killer whales to investigate how their communication differs and how human-generated ocean noise may interfere.

  • Documented logging in Quatsino Sound linked to government mapping errors

    Identified one of British Columbia’s largest Sitka spruce trees

    Captured rare before-and-after imagery of old-growth forest loss

    Recorded the scale and pace of clear-cutting across vulnerable ecosystems

Water Bears and People on Canada’s Eastern Edge

Mônica Taís Engel • Newfoundland & Labrador • 2026

  • Documented logging in Quatsino Sound linked to government mapping errors

    Identified one of British Columbia’s largest Sitka spruce trees

    Captured rare before-and-after imagery of old-growth forest loss

    Recorded the scale and pace of clear-cutting across vulnerable ecosystems

  • Images supported public awareness campaigns across British Columbia

    Work contributed to advocacy tied to the province’s 30x30 conservation commitment

    Helped strengthen support for Indigenous Protected and Conserved Areas (IPCAs)

    Photography continues to inform conservation planning and policy discussions

As sea ice conditions change, polar bears are spending more time on land along the coast of Newfoundland and Labrador.

In Newfoundland, Mônica Taís Engel is mapping these encounters to understand where they occur and how communities respond, as changing sea ice may keep bears on land longer.

  • Images supported public awareness campaigns across British Columbia

    Work contributed to advocacy tied to the province’s 30x30 conservation commitment

    Helped strengthen support for Indigenous Protected and Conserved Areas (IPCAs)

    Photography continues to inform conservation planning and policy discussions

Listening to Whales: Using Hydrophones, Drones, and AI to Unravel Killer Whale Communication Dynamics

  • Images supported public awareness campaigns across British Columbia

    Work contributed to advocacy tied to the province’s 30x30 conservation commitment

    Helped strengthen support for Indigenous Protected and Conserved Areas (IPCAs)

    Photography continues to inform conservation planning and policy discussions

  • Images supported public awareness campaigns across British Columbia

    Work contributed to advocacy tied to the province’s 30x30 conservation commitment

    Helped strengthen support for Indigenous Protected and Conserved Areas (IPCAs)

    Photography continues to inform conservation planning and policy discussions

EXPLORE OTHER FOCUS AREAS

WATER

HISTORY & CULTURE

HISTORY & CULTURE

LAND

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