Prioritizing resources for conserving biodiversity in Canada

优先考虑保护加拿大生物多样性的资源

• 批准号: 558292-2020
• 负责人: Bennett, Joseph
• 金额: $ 17.02万
• 依托单位: Carleton University
• 依托单位国家: 加拿大
• 项目类别: Alliance Grants
• 财政年份: 2021
• 资助国家: 加拿大
• 起止时间: 2021-01-01 至 2022-12-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nserc-crsng.gc.ca/ase-oro/Details-Detailles_eng.asp?id=720932
• 关键词: Prioritizing; resources; conserving; biodiversity; Canada

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.

加拿大有700多种有灭绝的风险。如果我们失去了它们，它们提供的美学，经济和文化价值将永远消失。在我国南部地区，对处于危险的物种的威胁通常是最严重的，在这种情况下，我们最高的生物多样性与我们最大的人口重叠。尤其是在这些领域中，为防止灭绝而需要保护和管家的私人和公共土地的合作伙伴关系。但是，鉴于发展压力和资源有限，至关重要的是，要尽可能有效地保护和管理土地的决策。为此，我们与加拿大自然保护协会（NCC）以及加拿大环境和气候变化（ECCC）合作，开发了做出更好的保护决策的工具和方法。我们的目标是生产基于用户友好的人工智能的决策支持工具，用于土地获取，管理和监视，并开发确保这些工具潜力充分实现的方法。这些工具将利用我们在优化保护决策方面做出的最新发展，包括在何时何地管理以及何时何地监测以减少不确定性的决定。 NCC和ECCC将使用它们来帮助确定土地获取，管理和监测的国家优先事项。我们还将在合作伙伴机构之外广泛咨询，以确保我们的工具与土著土地经理和当地土地信托的需求和价值兼容。除了这些工具外，我们还将开发用于更有效收集和使用数据进行保护决策的方法，特别是了解如何在保护决策中考虑栖息地之间的联系，并更好地将社区科学整合到监视管理方案中以告知管理层。我们还将开发更好的方法来激励社区科学和社区驱动的土地管理活动。最后，我们将使用我们的工具作为虚拟实验室来检查数千种潜在的保护方案，并得出一般指南，当土地管理者没有时间或资源进行详细的优先级活动时，他们可以使用这些指南。