Claudia Haas

Claudia has been studying wildlife in the Northwest Territories for a majority of her career, having moved to Yellowknife over 18 years ago. She has worked for the North Slave Métis Alliance and the Government of the Northwest Territories, mostly as a protected areas biologist. She has been fortunate to have worked throughout northern ecosystems and through that has herself seen the impacts of accelerated climate change. To help meet the management challenges ahead, Claudia co-founded a program that brings together Indigenous, territorial and federal government partners to set up an NWT-wide biodiversity monitoring network with large arrays of wildlife camera and audio recorders. These arrays will provide comprehensive information about wildlife communities which had since been lacking. Now through her PhD, Claudia hopes to find ways to describe northern wildlife communities in ways that better meets the needs of land managers, specifically Indigenous communities who rely on these species for their wellbeing and livelihoods. Her specific focus is to investigate the impact of disturbances on food webs to get insight into what changes we might anticipate with this changing climate.