Context matters: landscape connectivity and ecological integrity
Date: March 21, 2024 at 12 pm PT / 1 pm MT
Presenter: Dr. Justina Ray, Wildlife Conservation Society Canada.
Dr. Justina Ray has been President and Senior Scientist of Wildlife Conservation Society Canada since its incorporation in 2004. In addition to overseeing the operations of WCS Canada, Justina is involved in research and policy activities associated with land use planning and large mammal conservation in northern landscapes. Justina has been appointed to numerous government advisory panels related to policy development for species at risk and land use planning in Ontario and Canada. She was the co-chair of the Terrestrial Mammals Subcommittee of the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada (COSEWIC) from 2009-2017 and is currently a member of the IUCN Taskforce on Biodiversity and Protected Areas.
Justina will be joined by presentation co-author Dr. Lucy Poley for this webinar’s Q&A. Lucy has a background conducting research on wildlife and habitat interactions at both landscape and site scales, using tools such as aerial surveys, drones, satellite imagery, and field assessments and in varied environments including the boreal forest, the Rocky Mountains, and the tundra. More recently, in her role as the Ecosystem Criteria Coordinator for the Key Biodiversity Areas (KBA) initiative in Canada, she has taken an ecosystem-based approach to conservation, looking at how to best map and understand the condition and distribution of ecosystems and areas of globally significant high ecological integrity, as well as threats to their persistence in an increasingly developed world.
Ensuring for ecological connectivity becomes critical as soon as habitat fragmentation of a once ecologically intact system is underway. This makes it necessary to understand the character and significance of high ecological integrity ecosystems, i.e., where composition, structure, and function are within their natural state, but are diminishing at a global scale. Mounting evidence suggests that healthy, high integrity ecosystems are better able to persist, and to deliver the critical services on which humanity depends, than those on the lower end of the continuum characterized by fragmentation, degradation, and species loss. In this talk, Justina will explore the essential role that unfragmented, unroaded, and undeveloped lands and waters play in sustaining biodiversity and landscape connectivity, and the particular responsibility that Canada bears for this theme when it comes to the domestic implementation of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework.
