Thank you very much, Aran.
The work I'm going to present to you today was led by the BEACONs project in collaboration with the CBFA. BEACONs is a collaborative research project with academics from the University of Alberta, Laval, Memorial, and Simon Fraser University. Many of the concepts and methods I will speak to were developed with the support of Environment Canada.
Before I dive into the assessment, I will provide some background on this work.
Protected areas have been established for a number of reasons, but I'll focus on conservation planning. To date, protected areas have been the primary tool used by conservation planners to conserve biodiversity. Much effort has been dedicated to design efforts, yet despite these efforts, biodiversity continues to decline, which raises the question of why.
There are a number of reasons that protected areas can fail to achieve biodiversity objectives, and I'll speak to three.
The first is the use of policy-based targets. Given their lack of biological foundation, they have a high likelihood of failure with regard to maintaining biodiversity.
The sole reliance on protected areas for conservation action often leads to the erosion of landscape surrounding protected areas. If protected areas are not well designed, the effects of human development can infiltrate and negatively impact the ability of the protected area to conserve biodiversity.
So what does this mean for biodiversity conservation?
Within the CBFA there is recognition that protected areas have an important role to play in maintaining biodiversity, but that protected area networks alone will not conserve biodiversity and that all elements on the landscape have a role to play.
For example, as illustrated in the figure to the right, large-scale processes such as the movement of wide-ranging species such as caribou often extend well beyond protected area boundaries. How we manage landscapes around protected areas is just as important as how we manage within.
By managing these landscapes carefully, we can maintain functioning ecosystems throughout and have flexibility when responding to unexpected events. In other words, we plan proactively rather than reactively, which requires the application of ecologically sustainable land use practices.
Identifying sustainable land use practices can be a challenge, given a number of uncertainties: our knowledge of ecosystems is incomplete, the response of biodiversity to human development is largely unknown, and climate change compounds the issue.
However, rather than ignore this uncertainty, we can address it head-on by treating human development as an experiment. This requires controls and monitoring. Without controls, we cannot distinguish the effects of human development from climate change. We refer to these control areas as ecological benchmarks.
Ecological benchmarks are controls for understanding boreal systems and the response of biodiversity to management practices. Benchmarks are protected areas designed to be functional systems in and of themselves, with design specifications based on the best available science. They are designed to be large, intact, resilient to natural disturbances such as fire, and they capture both terrestrial and aquatic systems.
So how does the experiment work?
In this illustration, the matrix in brown represents the spaces between protected areas. Within the matrix we have a forest tenure outlined in blue where we would like to undertake sustainable land use.
If we detect a population decline within the tenure, we do not know if the decline is due to forestry practices or an external influence. However, if we add ecological benchmarks, we now have an experiment.