Wildlife monitoring project planned for Regina

We will soon have a better idea as to what animals call Regina home.

Starting sometime in October, a study will begin to better understand what animals are coming and going in and out of the city.

Ryan Fisher, the Royal Saskatchewan Museum’s curator of vertebrate zoology, is looking forward to finding out more about what is in our own backyard.

“The real objective of the project is to understand what characteristics of the city have a positive influence on biodiversity, or even potentially an influence,” Fisher said. “I’m sure there are hundreds of different types of birds that live in Regina and there’s lots of neat critters like rabbits and squirrels and raccoons and deer that also call Regina home.”

There will be 15 high-quality trail cameras and recorders set up and used in what Fisher is calling “biodiversity monitoring stations” inside and outside of city limits.

Each station will be valued at around $400 and they will be spread out in different zones.

“We will have some outside of the city limits — right on the edge of the city that are sort of half outside the city, half inside the city — and then our other sites will be kind of smack dab in kind of the core and just slightly outside the core,” Fisher said. “So really, we are kind of getting the gradients of not city-like  to completely city-like habitats.”

Saskatoon has a study of its own which it started last year, with the University of Saskatchewan’s Agriculture and Bio Resources team attaching up to 34 cameras to trees across the city to photograph the different critters and animals in their city.

The U of S study is expected to be a multi-year study, while the one in Regina is expected to be done periodically.

“I think we are well set up to maintain wildlife in Regina,” Fisher said. “Hopefully some of our results can give us a little bit of an idea of as to what things we might be able to do better to maintain wildlife habitat, whether that’s planting more trees or having more green space, or just leaving some areas in kind of a natural state.

“The cameras will be up for about a month, then we will take them down and put them up again in January, April, June and July.

“These stations generate a ton of information so it’s kind of meant to keep it a little bit manageable in terms of how many pictures and sound files we have coming in.”

Fisher anticipates a lot of interesting findings once the study gets underway.

“What better natural history and biodiversity study is there than to do it in our own backyard here in Regina?” Fisher said. “We are really excited to find out what is actually here and what’s calling Regina home.

“We are really interested to see what Regina looks like compared to some of the other cities where this research has been done before.”