PhD student aims to protect Canada's natural lands and mammals
BY ANDREW VOWLES
She grew up in Grimsby wanting to become a park ranger. Now completing her PhD in the Department of Integrative Biology, Yolanda Wiersma hopes her studies will help protect natural lands in northern Ontario and across the country.
Early this month, the former Fulbright Scholar will defend her thesis on design of protected areas in Canada. She and her supervisor, Prof. Tom Nudds, will also play host this week to scientists and conservation agencies attending a Parks Research Forum of Ontario (PRFO) workshop in Guelph to discuss approaches to preserving natural lands and their constituent plants and animals.
Both U of G biologists are in the vanguard of a recent movement to apply scientific rigour to designing protected spaces in Canada, from the still relatively untouched northern boreal forest of Ontario to the Mackenzie Valley, which is the site of a proposed 1,200-kilometre-long natural gas pipeline.
Nudds says today's preservation mantra for such areas as northern Ontario — the expanse above the 51st parallel that he calls “north of 51” — upends the theme that has shaped much of Canada's national parks system since Banff National Park was created in the 1880s as a playground for the well-to-do. Back then, he says, parks were considered islands of civilization in a sea of wilderness.
Now they're viewed as just the opposite: islands of wilderness in a sea of civilization. And rather than guarding those areas piecemeal and as an afterthought, groups from researchers to lawmakers and even industry are working to ensure their protection before allowing development such as forestry, mining and tourism, says Nudds.
“Instead of islands protected in a sea of development, we can set up the protected areas first to conserve biodiversity and then extract resources.”
That idea is embodied in recent legislation, from the Canada National Parks Act of 2000 to a provincial parks bill currently making its way through the Ontario legislature. And it's an idea Wiersma has explored during her graduate studies at Guelph.
Working with national data collected by geographical information systems and applying complex algorithms for richness and rarity of various mammal species, she has pinpointed about 50 candidate protected areas that collectively contain representatives of most of the country's mammalian species. The areas appear as squares — each about 3,000 square kilometres on average — dotted across a map divided into irregularly shaped ecoregions called the “mammal provinces of Canada.” Those “provinces” in the Mammal Atlas of Canada distinguish regions of the country not by political boundaries but by the kinds of landscapes and associated plants and animals found within them.
Wiersma's “hot spots” are ones that her analysis zeroed in on as likely regions to designate as protected areas or parks. She predicts that these “hot spots” will contain a representative cross-section of species, although she says that would need to be verified by fieldwork.
Perhaps not surprisingly, the candidate protected areas are scattered broadly across most of the national map. What's startling is how few of them line up with existing parks and protected areas. Wiersma says that disparity reflects the old-style “playground” paradigm. She says policy-makers armed with this new kind of analysis may protect areas of the country based not just on what's good for people but what's good for biodiversity.
In addition, her approach would see entire blocks of territory set aside, a better solution than aiming to protect a fixed percentage of land, she says. Under the percentage concept, a prescribed area of land captured on paper as candidate parks or protected areas might actually consist of scattered tiny islands too small to sustain biodiversity — as with many of Canada's existing parks.
Nudds says Wiersma's work has a dual focus: ensuring broad representation of species and setting aside enough room for those species to live.
Her research was funded by the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society and the Canadian Council on Ecological Areas, both non-profit groups working to establish representative protected areas on land and in Canadian waters.
A B.Sc.(Env.) and M.Sc. graduate of Guelph, Wiersma received a Fulbright Scholarship in 2002 to study landscape ecology and GIS at Duke University in North Carolina.
At this week's PRFO workshop, running March 9 and 10 at the Ramada Inn, she will give a talk on “Diversity and Representative Protected Areas for Mammals in Canada.” Keynote speaker at the gathering is Robert Pressey, a leading conservation biology expert from the University of Queensland and the external examiner for Wiersma's PhD.
For more information about the workshop, send e-mail to ywiersma@uoguelph.ca or coordinator@prfo.ca.
