"Short‐term recovery actions such as predator reductions and translocations will likely just delay caribou extinction," says the paper, published in the journal of the Society for Conservation Biology.
"It is clear that unless the cumulative impacts of land uses are effectively addressed through planning and management ... we will fail to achieve self‐sustaining woodland caribou populations."
Co-author Robert Serrouya of the Alberta Biodiversity Monitoring Institute said he and his colleagues used years of satellite data to determine how the forest on caribou habitat in B.C. and Alberta changed between 2000 and 2018.
Over that time, they found the two provinces had a net loss of at least 33,000 square kilometres of the old-growth forest that caribou need. That's about five times the size of Banff National Park.