In Canada, ArcticWOLVES has been divided into 2 major components and for each of these components a research proposal has been submitted for funding.

1. Trophic dynamics of Arctic food webs

This project focuses on trophic interactions (plants-herbivores-predators) among birds and mammals of the tundra, primarily in the small to medium size range. Our aim is to study the strength of these interactions and how they vary locally (i.e. across habitats) and regionally (i.e. across distant sites) in the Arctic. Canadian field sites will span a latitudinal (from 60° to 83°N) and a longitudinal range (from 62° to 140°W), thereby providing appropriate gradients for comparative work (for instance, plant productivity decreases from south to north whereas recent warming trends have apparently been more pronounced in western than in eastern Arctic). Our working hypothesis is that top-down processes driven by predators are the primary forces structuring arctic communities. Studying these trophic interactions using a comparative approach will allow us to shed some light on the questions of relative strength of bottom-up vs. top-down effects in structuring arctic communities, a necessary pre-requisite to evaluating the sensitivities of tundra ecosystems to disturbance.

We have structured our project into various sub-components based on taxonomic groups and trophic levels. Each sub-component has a set of specific objectives relevant to the study group and most of them will have two sets of field methods: extensive and intensive ones. Extensive methods will rely on a set of standard protocols that will be applied at all sites. They will insure that data collected by different investigators at different sites will be compatible and will allow comparative analyses over a broad spatial scale. Intensive methods will be applied only on a subset of sites for a given taxonomic group, often the sites where we have the most detailed knowledge of the study group. They will allow a more detailed investigation of questions specific to each taxonomic group, or will be used to calibrate some of the less intensive protocols applied at all sites. The field work for this project will be conducted mainly at 6 primary sites.

2. Impacts of climate change on terrestrial animal biodiversity

The goal of this project is to assess the current and future effects of climate change on terrestrial Arctic wildlife, focusing on a set of species chosen to maximize both scientific return and benefits to stakeholders. Selected species i) include a diversity of taxa (insects, birds, mammals) representative of all functional trophic groups (herbivores, insectivores, predators), ii) have a history of monitoring through scientific projects or local observations by trappers and hunters, iii) are managed as wildlife populations (e.g. by Canadian Wildlife Service or the Nunavut Wildlife Management Board), iv) contribute to the monitoring and maintenance of ecological integrity (Parks Canada), or the culture and well being of local communities, v) are sufficiently widespread geographically to feed international databases of circumpolar monitoring, and vi) are, in some cases, amenable to manipulative experiments. We will concentrate our efforts on key species of herbivores (geese, lemmings), and predators (foxes, snowy owls, falcons, gulls, jaegers), insectivores (shorebirds), and on their prey (insects) or forage species (plants) at several Canadian Arctic sites. This component of ArcticWOLVES is structured into several smaller projects arranged around 5 themes. These 5 themes propose to:

1. Measure the abundance, distribution, and phenology of reproduction of wildlife species using standard protocols to build a spatially-explicit database.
   
2. Assess change in wildlife abundance, distribution, and use by people from northern communities in relation to climatic change.
   
3. Assess changes in the habitat of selected wildlife species and soil micro-organisms that are linked to northern people, using a combination of field measurements and remote sensing data.
   
4. Conduct field experiments to measure the effects of key climatic events on herbivores, soil nutrient availability, and plant growth.
   
5. Evaluate our ability to project future changes in distribution and abundance of targeted species under different climate-change regimes using resource-selection functions.