https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/kz7qxe/nearly-half-of-canadas-monitored-wildlife-populations-are-in-decline >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.