Pacific Wild Live
What's new: the Virtual Rainforest Initiative
This year, we are continuing to work with both the Bella Bella and Hartley Bay Community Schools to deliver live streaming video of remote wildlife behaviour into the classroom. Students can monitor live streaming video, control the pan-tilt-zoom cameras, and save clips of interesting video for their own use. Now through partnerships with several organizations, the Virtual Rainforest Initiative is developing classroom content that incorporates video from the remote cameras. This program, called the Virtual Rainforest Initiative, is a partnership between the schools, Pacific Wild, The Nature Conservancy, the American Museum of Natural History's Department of Biodiversity and Conservation, and the Centre for Digital Media in Vancouver, B.C. Some of this content will be delivered via SmartBoard technology, an interactive, web-enabled teaching toolkit with a touch-sensitive board. Our goal is to inspire and engage students with the coastal temperate rainforest where they live, and to allow them to share their experiences with students from other schools through live web-based applications.
An enthusiastic team of Masters students at the Centre for Digital Media are dedicating their winter term to helping create SmartBoard-ready classroom materials, as well as developing the capacity to stream live video from our remote cameras to the web in an engaging and interactive format. You can read more about the team at
http://mdm.gnwc.ca/projects/industry/virtual-rainforest-initiative.
Pacific Wild Live: The portal to conservation on Canada’s Pacific Coast
Pacific Wild LIVE is a research and education-based project that aims to increase our understanding of elusive and previously unstudied coastal wildlife in the most non-invasive manner possible.
The Great Bear Rainforest remains one of the richest ecosystems on the planet. The marine and terrestrial environments support predator-prey relationships that are complex, awe-inspiring and among the least studied and understood. Understanding these relationships, and others, will better assist us in developing informed land and marine use plans for wildlife in the Great Bear Rainforest. In the absence of important life history and other ecological data, conservation plans in British Columbia are not fully incorporating the needs of these species, if at all.
To achieve this goal, Pacific Wild is building on two decades of experience in wildlife conservation by investing in the research and development of wireless video systems that will allow our researchers to observe and document wildlife behaviour in a non-invasive manner. Traditional approaches to wildlife behaviour research have caused habituation to humans and displacement of wildlife in prime feeding and foraging areas. While trophy hunting and poaching remain a threat to wildlife, habituation may leave species such as wolves and bears at a disadvantage. Quite simply, it is difficult for bears and other large carnivores to differentiate between a human carrying a video camera or a gun. Additionally, coastal wildlife such as wolf, bear, cougar, wolverine, marten, and others, naturally avoid people, making it difficult to document their occurrence and behaviour using traditional techniques.
Our remote systems utilize new generation digital video cameras in addition to wireless transmitters, software and alternative energy applications in remote parts of the B.C. coast. The cameras are remotely operated in various wildlife-viewing situations above and below the water. Infrared technology is being incorporated in order to record nocturnal behaviour.