Snow as a factor in the winter ecology of the barren-ground caribou. - Arctic

0 NE of the truisms of biology is that an animal cannot be considered apart from its environment. Yet in the brief history of northern biological research and especially in wildlife management this truism and its implications have frequently been forgotten in the haste to apply techni-ques used by biologists and wildlife managers in temperate zones. Too few biologists and wildlife managers have been cognizant of the fundamental ecological differences between the regions where the snow cover is per-manent in winter and those where the snow cover is intermittent or lacking. In the Subarctic many aspects of the animals ’ environment have an ecological effect quite different from that of the same aspects in the tem-perate zone. For example, it is widely known that deep snow or icing conditions seriously affect whitetail deer populations, but deer are subject to nival factors for only a short period of the year. In the Arctic and Subarctic the Barren Ground caribou encounters snow as an integral part of its environment for at least 8 months of the year. Yet subarctic snow is one of the least understood of natural phenomena and the ecological effect