Wildlife
Love thy neighbour: The bobcats taking over Calgary’s backyards
As cities grow, a new kind of biodiversity is emerging. Can we learn to live alongside the urban ecosystems we’ve helped create?
- 3272 words
- 14 minutes
This article is over 5 years old and may contain outdated information.
Who let the cat out of the bag? Your Wild Life did, with their latest project — a cat tracker!
Now you can find out what your cat does, where it goes, where it hunts and purr-haps all the germs it brings home. After you fill out a questionnaire, sign a consent form, get a GPS collar (or make one yourself), all that’s left to do is let your cat loose for nine days with the tracker.
Then upload its dirty little secrets and share.
The idea behind the project is to learn more about the behaviours of the mysterious, yet common household pet and its effects on the environment. According to a study published in Nature, “free-ranging domestic cats kill 1.3 – four billion birds and 6.3 – 22.3 billion mammals annually” in the United States, causing the need for policy intervention.
In 2012, there were at least 7.9 million cats living in Canadian homes. And shelters all across Canada are facing struggling with cat overpopulation.
But if you want to know more about the world of cats, don’t paws there. Take it a step further by downloading a FME workspace, which you can use to transform the data into spatial features, connect the dots and get your cat’s “prowling area.” You can even get your cat’s average velocity and speed. Finally, output the data into some KLM styling transformers and explore the mysterious world of your cat in Google Earth for the full effect.
Hopefully in this case, curiosity won’t kill the cat.
Wildlife
As cities grow, a new kind of biodiversity is emerging. Can we learn to live alongside the urban ecosystems we’ve helped create?
History
Pour comprendre les protestations des travailleurs qui ont ouvert la voie à la création de syndicats pour promouvoir les droits des ouvriers
Wildlife
Cats are responsible for about 196 million birds death every year
Wildlife
Why Canada’s cougars are on the rise — and what that means for us