PARENT SESSION
Contributed Oral Session 50: Restoration Management and Modeling
Tuesday, August 9, 8:00 AM - 11:30 AM, Meeting Room 521 A, Level 5, Palais des congrès de Montréal
The effect of spatial scale on reserve design in Canada.
Wiersma, Yolanda*,1, Nudds, Thomas*,1, 1 University of Guelph, Guelph, Ontario, Canada
ABSTRACT- Planning for representative reserve networks is currently being undertaken in many parts of Canada. Other jurisdictions within the country have recently completed exercises in protected area network design. Many of these exercises in reserve planning have applied principles such as complementarity to the process. In addition, a number have made use of heuristic algorithms summarized in the literature. However, because these exercises are undertaken largely by government agencies, they are confined to designs within political boundaries, and thus, from an ecological standpoint, may not represent the most efficient solution set. Here, we develop representative reserve networks for disturbance-sensitive mammals across Canada. We use ecologically defined regions (mammal provinces and ecoregions) as the target zones to identify near-optimal solutions for protected areas across multiple spatial scales. We show that the scale of the target region has an effect on the minimum number of protected areas required to achieve representation; with larger regions not always being comprised of the sum of the parts. Our study illustrates how the use of politically bounded target regions may actually introduce inefficiencies in identifying representative reserve networks.
Key words: reserve design, mammals, Canada, spatial scale