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[Parks Canada beaver logo]
[title: parkscanada.gc.ca]

[text on screen: Donald McLennan of Parks Canada explains how predicting changes in ecotypes predicts changes in grizzly bear feeding]

[text on screen: Ivvavik National Park
Yukon, Canada]

[scientists hiking beside river bed]

[Donald McLennan talks to us as he and a colleague analyze a meadow and its habitat]
Donald McLennan: So we were talking about those dry terraces and if you look in the cut bank you can see that they are made of these rocky gravels where the water passes through very quickly, it’s where our sub-mesic spruce stand. Now we simply come across the road, maybe 15 feet, and we’re looking at this stand which we’re calling spruce sedge, and what’s happening here is a completely different ecological process. What’s happening here is in the spring you have frozen soil right to the surface and as you look up the slope you can see that the water is going to come down from the high elevation through here and it’s going to spread out and so as that active layer melts, the ice that was in the soil turns to water and runs over the active layer that’s there..

[Donald pointing to the top of the hillside]
Donald: It’s continually sending moisture down to these slopes here. So the vegetation tells us what is happening.

[Donald shows us the sedges and discusses the habitat]
Donald: If you bend down here, we’re looking at these sedges, this is Carex scirpoidea that is coming down here, eh. This particular plant, we know grows in continuously moist and sub irrigated soils. So there’s lines of evidence, all these different lines of evidence we use to interpret the site and the process. So if you’re going to have more rain in this environment, if the permafrost table is going to go deeper with thawing, the processes on this site will change and by understanding that, we can possibly understand or predict how this site will change. The grizzly bears like these sedges early in the spring, they’re nice and tender, they’ll come and have a chew on them, but if they stop growing here it might lose its value as grizzly habitat.

[text on screen: To learn more about Parks Canada visit www.pc.gc.ca]

[title: Created for Parks Canada by HyperfocalFilms www.hyperfocalfilms.com]
[title: Parks Canada/Parcs Canada government logo]
[title: Copyright - Her Majesty the Queen in Right of Canada, represented by Parks Canada, 2010]
[title: Government of Canada logo]
[end]