Prioritizing resources for conserving biodiversity in Canada

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Over 700 species are at risk of extinction in Canada. If we lose them, the aesthetic, economic and cultural values they provide us will disappear forever. Threats to species at risk are often most acute in southern areas of our country, where our highest biological diversity overlaps with our largest human populations. In these areas in particular, partnerships to protect and steward both private and public lands will be necessary to prevent extinctions. However, given development pressure and limited resources, it is crucial that decisions for conserving and stewarding lands are made as effectively as possible. To this end, we have partnered with the Nature Conservancy of Canada (NCC) and Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC), to develop tools and methods to make better conservation decisions. Our goals are to produce user-friendly artificial intelligence-based decision support tools for land acquisition, stewardship and monitoring, and to develop methods that ensure the potential of these tools is fully realized. The tools will exploit recent developments we have made in optimizing conservation decisions, including decisions of where and when to manage, and where and when to monitor to reduce uncertainty. They will be used by NCC and ECCC to help set national priorities for land acquisition, stewardship and monitoring. We will also consult widely outside of our partner agencies, to ensure that our tools are compatible with the needs and values of Indigenous land managers and local land trusts. In addition to these tools, we will develop methods for more effective collection and use of data for conservation decisions, specifically to understand how connections among habitats should be considered in conservation decisions, and to better integrate community science into monitoring programs to inform management. We will also develop better ways of incentivizing community science and community-driven land stewardship activities. Finally, we will use our tools as virtual laboratories to examine thousands of potential conservation scenarios, and derive general guidelines that land managers can use when they do not have the time or resources for detailed prioritization activities.