Community-led wildlife health monitoring for a resilient and healthy Nunavik

A new initiative, funded by the Canada-Inuit Nunangat-United Kingdom Arctic Research Programme and conducted in partnership with the Nunavik Research Centre, aims to revolutionize wildlife health monitoring in the Arctic. The overall objective of this programme is to detect climate-sensitive infectious diseases and trends in current diseases that impact wildlife, the safety and security of country food, and Inuit health.

To carry out its objectives, the project aims to develop and validate novel techniques to detect wildlife pathogens at a watershed scale by sampling DNA and RNA shed into the natural environment. These techniques will overcome the challenge of directly monitoring pathogens in large wildlife, such as caribou, whose home ranges span hundreds of kilometres of inaccessible and remote terrain, and collect important baseline data to discover new pathogens of risk to wildlife and people.