Prioritizing resources for conserving biodiversity in Canada

加拿大有700多个物种濒临灭绝。如果我们失去它们，它们为我们提供的美学、经济和文化价值将永远消失。对濒危物种的威胁往往在我国南部地区最为严重，那里生物多样性最丰富，人口最多。特别是在这些领域，保护和管理私人和公共土地的伙伴关系对于防止掠夺是必要的。然而，鉴于发展压力和有限的资源，必须尽可能有效地作出保护和管理土地的决定。为此，我们与加拿大自然保护协会（NCC）和加拿大环境与气候变化协会（ECCC）合作，开发工具和方法，以做出更好的保护决策。我们的目标是为土地征用、管理和监测提供用户友好的基于人工智能的决策支持工具，并开发确保这些工具的潜力得到充分发挥的方法。这些工具将利用我们在优化保护决策方面取得的最新进展，包括在何处和何时进行管理，以及在何处和何时进行监测以减少不确定性。净捐助国和柬埔寨特别捐助国将利用这些数据帮助确定国家在土地征用、管理和监测方面的优先事项。我们还将广泛咨询我们的合作伙伴机构之外，以确保我们的工具符合土著土地管理者和当地土地信托的需求和价值观。除了这些工具，我们将开发更有效地收集和使用数据的保护决策的方法，特别是了解栖息地之间的连接应如何在保护决策中考虑，并更好地将社区科学纳入监测计划，以告知管理。我们还将制定更好的办法，激励社区科学和社区推动的土地管理活动。最后，我们将使用我们的工具作为虚拟实验室来检查数千个潜在的保护方案，并得出土地管理者在没有时间或资源进行详细的优先级排序活动时可以使用的一般指导方针。

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.