Canadians soon might not recognize the animals on our pocket change. A new report from the conservation nonprofit World Wildlife Fund Canada (WWF-Canada) shows that nearly half of the country's monitored vertebrate wildlife populations are in decline. (Invertebrate creatures are far less well-studied.) The populations that are declining, including woodland caribou, lake whitefish, and swift fox, dropped 83 percent on average since 1970.

The tendency for researchers (and research funders) to focus on commercially popular animals, partly because they're of interest to hunters and businesses, has left other species understudied, experts told me. For example, Canada has 20 percent of the world's freshwater, but has barely scratched the surface in terms of researching the creatures that live there, and their ecosystems.

The WWF-Canada report points to problems with this country's Species at Risk Act (SARA), which may not be working as well as conservationists hope to protect native species.

Barren ground caribou. Video: VideoFort via Shutterstock. GIF: Jacob Dubé

This won't come as a surprise to anyone who's been paying attention to the animal world. Last year, WWF's Living Planet Report, which examines biodiversity loss every two years on a global scale, found that the populations of two-thirds of wild animals around the world could be in decline by 2020. WWF-Canada's vice-president of science, research and innovation James Snider told me that, with this in mind, it was important to get a better understanding of what was happening in Canada specifically.

"Our focus is to say, where do we need to be doing more? There's a lot of trends here in Canada's wildlife population that are indicative of declines, [suggesting] more action is needed in terms of wildlife conservation," Snider said.