Kluane Red Squirrel Project

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About Kluane Red Squirrel Project

Pictures in or around Squirrel Camp, kilometer 1617 Alaska Highway, Yukon, Canada.

The Kluane Red Squirrel Project is an interdisciplinary, large-scale field experiment designed to test the importance of food abundance to the ecology and evolution of red squirrels. The project is based in the southwest Yukon of Canada, where red squirrels have been studied extensively since 1987. In this part of their range, red squirrels feed almost exclusively on the seeds of white spruce cones (Picea glauca). White spruce is a masting species and as such produces extremely high numbers of cones every 2-6 years with very low numbers of cones usually produced in the intervening years. Individual red squirrels, therefore, are likely to experience both very high and very low levels of food within their lifetime. Research performed over the past 18 years has indicated that yearly variation in the abundance of spruce cones has important ecological and evolutionary consequences.

http://www.redsquirrel.msu.edu/