Prioritizing resources for conserving biodiversity in Canada

加拿大有700多种物种面临灭绝的危险。如果我们失去了它们，它们提供给我们的美学、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，那里的生物多样性最高，人口最多。特别是在这些地区，保护和管理私人和公共土地的伙伴关系对于防止物种灭绝是必要的。然而，鉴于发展压力和有限的资源，尽可能有效地作出保护和管理土地的决定是至关重要的。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部（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，并开发方法，确保这些工具的潜力得到充分实现。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，包括决定何时何地进行管理，何时何地进行监控，以减少不确定性。NCC和ECCC将利用它们来帮助制定国家土地征用、管理和监测方面的优先事项。我们还将在我们的伙伴机构之外广泛咨询，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，我们还将开发更有效地收集和使用保护决策数据的方法，特别是了解如何在保护决策中考虑栖息地之间的联系，以及更好地将社区科学纳入监测计划，为管理提供信息。我们还将制定更好的办法，鼓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，并得出土地管理者在没有时间或资源进行详细的优先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.