Introduction

The wildlife camera monitoring project is part of the McMurray Métis’ broader Community-Based Monitoring Program, in which community members identified Métis Environmental and Cultural Components important to the community. Examples of these components include water, air, access to the land, and wildlife, including animals such as moose, buffalo, muskrat, and weasels. For the camera project, the monitoring project was designed to collect data on mammals and small furbearers important to hunting and trapping and McMurray Métis Way of Life.

The Cumulative Environmental and Cultural Effects Model provides a framework to define pathways of effects on valued components. The community members identified activities and potential pressures that generate impacts on Métis Environmental and Cultural Components to create the conceptual model. Activities such as different types of land use (i.e., forestry, oil sands development, urbanization) create pressures such as pollutants, land disturbance, or disease that potentially generate pathways of effects on valued components. More work through community-based monitoring is required to understand the pathways of effects on the Métis Environmental and Cultural Components. For this project, the camera monitoring program was designed to study how land disturbance and natural disturbance affect mammals and small furbearers.

The Cumulative Environmental and Cultural Effects Model also provides a framework to evaluate where gaps in information are in understanding the pathways of effects on Métis Environmental and Cultural Components. When gaps are identified, a community-based monitoring program can be designed to answer questions about pathways of effects on the components. As a recommendation from the community members, this approach is informed by both Métis Indigenous Knowledge and western scientific knowledge. Where western scientists are conducting monitoring that may provide information about the pathways of effects on Métis Environmental and Cultural Components, McMurray Métis seeks to collaborate and understand what information is being collected and how it informs the model. For example, in 2021-2022, McMurray Métis community members will work with Principal Investigators from the Oil Sands Monitoring Program studying mammals to identify how data from their monitoring programs may inform the pathways of effects for valued components identified by McMurray Métis. This work generated a series of sub-models for different animals. More work is needed to further develop the pathways of effects for each of the valued components.

The current design of the camera monitoring program was created through a collaboration between McMurray Métis trappers and western scientists at the Alberta Biodiversity Monitoring Institute (ABMI) and InnoTech Alberta. The camera locations were determined based on how trappers use the traplines; ABMI and InnoTech Alberta provided global positioning system (GPS) coordinates along the trails to create a sampling design that allowed for statistical analysis of the camera images, and accounted for the distance between cameras. The analysis applied to the camera images assessed different types of pressures such as distance of land disturbance (or human footprint) to the camera location, type of disturbance (or human footprint) on the trapline, and wildfire history of the trapline. This approach generated data to understand how much and what type of disturbance is present on each trapline and whether the amount and type of disturbance (anthropogenic or natural) had any relationship to the animals captured on the cameras. 

The goal of the Cumulative Environmental and Cultural Effects Model is to generate a common understanding of how cultural and environmental systems function in McMurray Métis Traditional Territory. The model is designed to identify cause-effect relationships and understand how causal pathways through the human-ecological system can affect the McMurray Métis way of life, both presently and into the future. Identifying and understanding activities, pressures, and components is essential to this model. The camera monitoring project provides data to test hypotheses about the type and amount of land disturbance and the pathways of effects of these disturbances on mammals and small furbearers. It is the goal of McMurray Métis to have community members lead and develop this knowledge system at all stages and to expand community-based monitoring to collect data to validate the cause-effect relationships that have potential to impact McMurray Métis Way of Life.

An understanding of cumulative effects is central to all McMurray Métis monitoring activities. The cumulative effects assessment approach acknowledges the holistic nature of the system, and recognizes the inter-connectedness of everything, including  air, water, land, rights, animals, plants, soil, wetlands, and reclamation. The cumulative effects assessment approach is used by McMurray Métis to describe how human and environmental components interact throughout McMurray Métis’ Traditional Territory.

This approach is not specific to any one project, program, field of study, or time-period. Most environmental impact assessments and regulatory processes in the Oil Sands Region focus on one project at a time, but the reality is all projects are in construction and operations simultaneously throughout the territory generating cumulative impacts. McMurray Métis uses the cumulative effects assessment methodology to describe the past, present and future conditions of the Traditional Territory and the traplines studied in this camera monitoring project. In this way, multiple impacts on Métis Environmental and Cultural Components can be assessed additively to provide a territory-wide understanding of current conditions compared to past conditions or historic baseline described by Métis Elders and knowledge holders. It is important that the historic baseline for impact assessment acknowledges the long history of Métis people in northeastern Alberta, which dates back to before colonial control.