Ecologically resilient and sustainable multi-functional landscapes

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Contemporary scientific understanding of landscape-scale ecological functions and processes emphasizes the importance of interactions across multiple scales and subsystems. Understanding and planning for such interactions is essential for maintaining ecologically resilient and sustainable landscapes. Land use planning and conservation efforts in Canada, however, are often focused on a single resource, habitat type or species, mostly due to a lack of appropriate tools to integrate the full complexity of the system into the decision-making process. This NSERC funded research program focuses on the development of tools that incorporate such complexity, and the application of these tools to support environmental management and planning decisions for resilience on large landscapes. ******Over the next five years, the Okanagan Valley in British Columbia will serve as a case study region. The Okanagan Valley is one of Canada's fastest growing regions and is undergoing rapid land use change. The Okanagan comprises some of Canada's most biologically diverse ecosystems with more than 20% of the region being classified as having high or very high relative biodiversity. These ecological values, as well as ecosystem service provisioning, are at risk as human land use and urban development continue to increase. This research program will quantify the environmental impacts and trade-offs of different land use change scenarios for the Okanagan, and make recommendations on how to maintain an ecologically resilient landscape that conciliates human land use (agriculture, timber harvest and built environments) with ecosystem services provisioning and biodiversity conservation (area and connectivity of natural habitats). ******Methods will involve: 1) developing and applying mapping and individual-based modelling tools to identify locations of ecological corridors for large landscapes, both to facilitate wildlife movement and the flow of ecosystem services; 2) evaluating the overlap between areas important for ecosystem service provisioning and connectivity and areas of importance for conserving biodiversity on a landscape; and, 3) further refining scientific understanding of ecological resilience by developing and testing a quantitative, working definition of landscape resilience. This work will, therefore, contribute new modelling methods and approaches for assessing landscape connectivity for both wildlife movement and ecosystem service provisioning as well as quantitative measures of resilience at the landscape scale.******In addition to making important methodological and scientific contributions, this research will inform conservation efforts in British Columbia's southern interior. By providing quantitative support for integrated land use planning, this research program will have a direct and applied impact on the direction of future growth in the Okanagan Valley, providing a Canadian model of an ecologically resilient and sustainable landscape.**