On behalf of BC Hydro, we’ve developed and are now implementing a long-term monitoring program to look into the interaction between populations and movement of large wildlife (ungulates and bears) and the production of agricultural crops in and around the Peace River valley. In this applied research program, we use a fairly extensive network of camera traps, multispectral remote sensing, and detailed field surveys (read: counting canola pods and seeds for days) to answer questions surrounding how wildlife populations react to a major infrastructure project, and how those potential changes may affect agricultural production in our program area.
This is the type of applied research where our experience in designing, implementing, and analysing large, long-term projects in applied biology and agrology really shines. Plus, we get to sit down with agricultural producers for a coffee and chat every now and then, which is as close to working at an elevator as our agrologists get these days.
Fun fact: our camera trap network collects over 250,000 images every year. It’s safe to say we have learned to get comfortable handling and processing large data sets but need to give our machine learning setup a big chunk of the credit. We could talk camera traps all day!
