Environment committee  Thank you. My name is Sarah but feel free to call me by my nickname, Sally. Thank you for this opportunity to present my views on habitat protection in Canada. I'm a professor at the University of British Columbia, where I have been teaching biology for nearly two decades now. M

Environment committee  Yes.

Environment committee  Okay, thank you. We must work together—individuals, corporations, and government—to protect habitat, but habitat protection cannot be all that we do. While many species are at risk due to habitat destruction, fragmentation, others are not. Some are at risk because of the toxins

Environment committee  Thank you for your question. No, I do not at all believe that only applied research is important.

Environment committee  I'll speak to your question about basic science. I am a basic scientist, and I think many of the people who are active in science believe themselves to be fundamentally interested in the processes that have led to and maintain the diversity around us. But I can't study the evolu

Environment committee  These changes happened very recently. I am not aware yet of scientific assessments of the changes that have been caused. I am sure there will be some, and we will be tracking that.

Environment committee  That's a very good question. My colleague, Jeannette Whitton, listed the major reasons for placing species at risk currently. She didn't mention climate change because, so far, it has not been. Our climate is changing so rapidly and scientists have been able to track the movemen

Environment committee  Since we wrote that report, I'm pleased to say that a lot of our efforts at the Biodiversity Research Centre and the associated Beaty Biodiversity Museum have been exactly that—to make our data publicly accessible. We're in the midst of that databasing effort. I think that if t

Environment committee  Yes.

Environment committee  Yes, and there are provincial efforts along the same direction as well.

Environment committee  Yes, and some of that is already available. You can go online into global databases such as GBIF to find out exactly where species have been recorded. Mind you, the efforts are very biased to where people are looking, and that tends to be in the highly populated areas, so we do

Environment committee  We are certainly in the midst of one of the most major extinctions of life on this planet, and at the rate it's going now, we will soon become, I believe, the most important extinction event. I have to say that I am not a climate scientist, but the experts who I have consulted

Environment committee  A balanced approach, certainly. But I would also say that SARA does take a fairly balanced approach. If you take a look at those seven recovery action plans that have been made, they're not all about habitat. Indeed, not one of them protects additional habitat than what was alrea

Environment committee  A little bit.

Environment committee  It is natural for a species to go extinct. It is not natural for them to go extinct at the rate that they're currently going extinct. The other issue is that it's a biased extinction. The species that are going extinct are the ones that cannot co-exist with humans, that are not