Summary

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.

The overall goal of this project is to provide replicate populations of red squirrels with consistently high levels of food across multiple generations to experimentally test the importance of food abundance to the ecology and evolution of life history traits in this wild mammal.