NORTHERN PERSPECTIVES

Here is an image of Moxie, a female, tame caribou in northern Ontario consuming some stick-lichen (Usnea spp.). Moxie and 15 other tame caribou allowed us to quantify caribou-specific nutritional resources across the boreal forest. Specifically, we combined tedious foraging-trials, where we documented the number of bites per plant species that the tame caribou consumed across different vegetative communities, with extensive lab-based forage quality analyses to identify which communities provide caribou with high quality forage. My thesis further extends the information obtained via the tame caribou to their wild counterparts, as I use GPS telemetry data to evaluate how wild caribou balance the trade-offs between selecting for high quality forage while avoiding predation risk across northern Ontario.