About the project
This project was carried out in partnership with the Tsleil-Waututh Nation, in their traditional territory around Burrard Inlet near Vancouver, British Columbia. The aim is to monitor wolves through one of the most sensitive periods in their year — denning season — without putting people on the ground in the area.
Denning is when wolf families are at their most vulnerable. Pups are born and stay in or near the den for weeks, and parents are tightly bound to the site. Even a brief human presence — researchers walking in to swap a memory card or check a sensor — can be enough to make a family abandon a den. Ecologists working in the area wanted to understand how wolves were using the landscape during this window, but the standard fieldwork toolkit was the wrong tool for the question.
For the Tsleil-Waututh — whose name səlilwətaɬ translates as “People of the Inlet” — the wolf is not an abstract conservation target. According to oral history, the Creator transformed a wolf into the first Tsleil-Wautt on the shores of Burrard Inlet, establishing a kinship between the people and the wolf clan that endures today. Helping wolves through denning season undisturbed is conservation work that aligns directly with cultural responsibility.
The project also sits in a practical context: FortisBC has infrastructure work underway in the wider area and committed to high-quality wildlife monitoring through the sensitive denning window. The science programme itself is led by Zoetica Environmental, a BC-based biodiversity consultancy whose practice explicitly bridges western science and traditional knowledge — and who hold the relationship with the Nation’s land guardians on the ground.
How it works
We deployed 20 Instant Detect cameras across known wolf travel routes, suspected denning zones and corridor entry points. Each camera runs an AI model trained specifically to recognise wolves, filtering out the constant background traffic of other wildlife — deer, bears, smaller mammals — that floods most camera-trap networks in this part of BC. Only confirmed wolf detections are forwarded; everything else stays on the device.
The cameras report into a dedicated Instant Detect base station installed in the area, with its own solar power setup sized for year-round operation. The base station aggregates signals from the camera network over long-range radio and forwards alerts upstream to the team, so there is no dependency on local cellular coverage — and no truck rolls back into the bush to keep the system online.
Because the cameras and base station are entirely solar-powered and autonomous, the network can stay in place across the full denning season without anyone re-entering sensitive habitat. No repeat human visits, no scent trails along the den approach, no disturbance — just a near-continuous, low-touch view of who is passing when, where families are moving and how the territory is being used.
The on-device AI is what makes this workable. With limited bandwidth typical of remote BC terrain, sending only verified wolf images keeps the link usable and the signal-to-noise ratio high. Ecologists open their inbox to wolves, not to thousands of triggered-by-deer thumbnails to sort through.
Local knowledge first
Site selection and operational decisions were made together with Tsleil-Waututh land guardians, the Zoetica field team and ecologists familiar with the territory. Their knowledge of seasonal movement, traditional travel routes and den-site sensitivities shaped where cameras went and how the system was tuned. The Nation retains stewardship of the data collected — the technology is in service of their own monitoring goals, not the other way around.
Impact
For ecologists, the network provides what was previously almost impossible in this landscape: behavioral and movement data through denning season at fine temporal resolution, gathered without a single human footfall near a den. For the Nation, it offers an evidence base for stewardship decisions and a way to keep the cultural relationship with the wolf grounded in current, on-the-land observation.
It also points to a wider model: AI-filtered camera networks, operated by Indigenous land stewards, monitoring sensitive species across vast and otherwise inaccessible territory — quietly, autonomously and on the community’s own terms.
