Wildwatch Worker Awareness Program

Wild Watch is a citizen science program that enables Cenovus employees and contractors to report their wildlife observations through a website, smart phone app or hard copy forms. The program was conducted at Christina Lake, Foster Creek, Narrows Lake and Telephone Lake. The objectives of the program were to: (1) increase employee awareness of wildlife stewardship, (2) generate a digital dataset to inform Cenovus’ Wildlife Mitigation Plan, and (3) embrace the potential of a citizen science program to inform larger landscape scale wildlife impacts, including coordination with neighbouring partners.

Overall employee feedback about Wild Watch was positive. The data was helpful to environmental field advisors in understanding presence/absence of species, when and where species are occurring on-site, and if there are concerning interactions occurring with wildlife. In 2016, there were 252 observations by 85 participants. Out of the 38 total species recorded that year, 10 were species at risk, including 33 observations of caribou, which are listed as a sensitive species by the Government of Alberta.