The wood bison has been added to the Northwest Territories List of Species at Risk.
The wood bison are being considered a threatened species.
There will be a mandatory strategy put in place in the next 2 years to begin to protect their numbers.
Minister of Environment and Natural Resources, Robert C. McLeod, says the listing means a strategy must be made in order to maintain healthy animals in the Northwest Territories:
“Wood bison face a number of serious threats in the Northwest Territories, including infectious diseases, predation, human-caused mortality and habitat loss.”
Overall, the population of the wood bison in the NWT is small, sitting at roughly 2 500 animals total, which is a sharp decline of what the numbers previously were.
