ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on Arctic ungulates and people in Canada’s Northwest Territories (NWT). It is assumed that the NWT is representative of other circumpolar regions at least in the context of Arctic ungulate ecology and climate change. People, caribou, and musk-oxen have been through climatic changes over at least the last 8,000 years—the span of human occupancy. People abandoned and then reoccupied areas as the climate changed, and they adapted their culture as the environment varied. The chapter explores the relationships among climate, ungulates, and humans by describing people’s dependence on caribou and musk-oxen, contrasting caribou and musk-ox ecology in relation to weather, summarizing predictions of climate change for the Arctic, evaluating information on the cumulative effects of weather on ungulate population size, and predicting changes in caribou and musk-ox populations and what these mean to people in the NWT.
