| Abstract/Description or Keywords |
Description: The Canadian Rocky Mountains ecoregion (CRM) covers approximately 27.1 million hectares (66.9 million acres) extending across three states and two provinces. The ecoregion extends over a large portion of the Rocky Mountains from southeastern British Columbia and southwestern Alberta to northern Idaho, northwestern Montana and a small part of northeastern Washington. Elevation ranges from 915 m to 3,954 m (3,000 ft to 12,972 ft), with Mt. Robson (BC) being the highest peak in the ecoregion. Geologically, this ecoregion is very complex, containing bedrock of sedimentary, igneous, and metamorphic origin; and is largely characterized by steep glaciated over thrust mountains with sharp alpine ridges and cirques at higher elevations. Historic and current glaciation has sculpted the mountainous landscape filling many of the intermountain valleys with glaciofluvial deposits and moraines. Land Ownership: Most of the ecoregion is public land and managed for various purposes by provincial, federal and state agencies. The largest land manager in the ecoregion is the Province of British Columbia, which controls 46.4% of the land base in the form of multiple use Crown Lands, Timber Supply Areas and Provincial Parks. The second largest land manager is the U.S. Forest Service, which manages 16.6% of the land within the ecoregion, followed by the Province of Alberta with 9.6% and Parks Canada with 8.4% of the ecoregion’s land base under their jurisdiction. Most of the public and industrial land holdings are on the lowest productivity soils, either in the mountains or in arid valleys. Aside from a few mining claims in the mountains, private land occurs in the valley bottoms containing the best soils and access to water. Only 13.1% of the land within the ecoregion is privately held. Protected Status: The CRM has one of the most extensive protected area systems of any conterminous North American ecoregion. Protected areas make up approximately 23.8% of the ecoregion. A combination of extensive rugged topography and public ownership favored these areas for protected status. Several large wilderness areas account for most of the total, but there is an extensive system of smaller public and private reserves throughout the ecoregion. A detailed study of protected status carried out for this ecoregional plan identified 358 protected areas and reveals that approximately 2.2% of the ecoregion is managed strictly for biodiversity values (equivalent to GAP Status I), and 21.0% is moderately protected (equivalent to GAP Status II). Biodiversity Status: At least 67 plants, animals and plant communities are known to be endemic to the CRM. There are 56 known globally imperilled (G1-G2) species and 21 species federally listed as threatened or endangered (U.S. Endangered Species Act and the Committee On the Status of Endangered Wildlife In Canada (COSEWIC)). Another 9 are of special concern due to their vulnerable, declining, endemic, and/or disjunct status. This ecoregion is best recognized for its full complement of large mammals. Elk, Rocky Mountain bighorn sheep, mountain goats, mule deer, white-tailed deer, moose, and woodland caribou are among the large ungulate species. Some of the most threatened species are carnivores, and this ecoregion supports populations of grizzly bears, gray wolves, wolverines, fishers and lynx. More common carnivores include the black bear, cougar, coyote, bobcat, and American marten. While populations for some of these species are stable, others are declining as a result of cumulative impacts from roads and other human uses. The CRM also contains significant freshwater biodiversity values. This ecoregion includes the headwaters of many of the major rivers in North America (including the Fraser, Saskatchewan, Missouri, and Columbia) and many large natural lakes and reservoirs (Kinbasket, Quesnel, Arrows, and Flathead). Within the ecoregion are populations of white sturgeon (the largest freshwater fish in North America) and salmonids, including anadromous salmon and some of the last remaining strongholds for westslope cutthroat trout and bull trout, as well as a number of endemic species. Ecoregional Assessment: The Nature Conservancy and Nature Conservancy of Canada convened a multijurisdictional team in March 2000 with the objective of employing a science-based approach to design a portfolio of conservation areas for the Canadian Rocky Mountains ecoregion. This assessment is not meant to serve as a protected areas strategy since it is recognized that conservation in this ecoregion will require a wide range of public/private conservation and stewardship strategies. The CRM ecoregional assessment represents a first step in this process by developing a network of conservation areas that with proper management would ensure the long-term persistence of the ecoregion’s species, communities and ecological systems. Conservation Targets: Conservation targets, the focus of conservation efforts in the CRM, include both coarsescale (40 terrestrial ecological systems and 77 aquatic ecological systems) and fine-scale targets (75 rare plant communities, 94 plants, and 56 animals). The team selected the fine filter targets based on their imperilment, vulnerability, endemism, declining status, and the inability of coarse-scale measures alone to conserve them. Aquatic and terrestrial ecological systems were used to represent a broader level of biological diversity across the ecoregion. We assumed that a combination of fine-scale and coarse-scale target selection would be a robust way to capture the broadest array of biodiversity in the ecoregion. According to Haufler et al. (2002), this strategy has the advantages of being scientifically defensible and feasible to implement, and allows for the integration of social and economic objectives. Portfolio Design: The team compiled and analyzed data from numerous sources, including British Columbia, Alberta, Washington, Idaho and Montana Conservation Data Centres and Natural Heritage Programs, the Washington Department of Fish & Wildlife, GAP Analysis Programs, and expert workshops. The team convened 10 expert workshops and meetings, with over 100 participants, to fill data gaps and obtain up-to-date information on conservation targets and places of significance. The team also used biophysical models as tools to identify, evaluate, and represent the natural variability of aquatic and terrestrial systems across environmental gradients within the ecoregion. A key component of this ecoregion is its full complement of large mammals, in particular wide-ranging carnivores – grizzly bears, gray wolves, wolverines, fishers and lynx. Traditional ecoregional planning methods (special element and ecosystem representation approaches) have struggled with integrating wide-ranging carnivore conservation goals. To address this critical element of conservation planning for the CRM ecoregion, the team coordinated their work with the Rocky Mountain Carnivore Project initiated by World Wildlife Fund Canada with support from The Nature Conservancy. Principle researchers for The Rocky Mountain Carnivore Project included Dr. Carlos Carroll (The Klamath Centre for Conservation Research), Dr. Reed Noss (Conservation Science, Inc.), and Dr. Paul Paquet (World Wildlife Fund Canada)2 worked with the team to develop a number of static and dynamic models that allowed the CRM team to design a portfolio that would adequately conserve wide-ranging carnivores and their habitat. After assessing the viability of target occurrences and developing conservation goals for targets, the team used SITES, a computerized algorithm and software program, to select and design a portfolio of conservation areas. The team refined the modeled output through a series of interactive workshops with team members, Conservation Data Centre and Natural Heritage Program scientists, and other experts. Portfolio of Conservation Areas: A total of 4,836 watersheds were part of the final conservation portfolio, totalling 13,455,793 hectares (33,249,264 acres) and equalling 49.7 % of the ecoregion. Portfolio watersheds were subsequently delineated as Conservation Areas and where possible, individual planning units were aggregated into larger conservation units called Conservation Landscapes. Conservation Landscapes were built by clustering watersheds that were geographically connected and that shared common ecological processes. These groupings were also clustered based on criteria related to conservation opportunity, including tying together areas where land ownership patterns, such as protected areas, created obvious mechanisms for common conservation action. While the bulk of the conservation solution was aggregated into Conservation Landscapes, an additional 20 individual watersheds were selected to meet conservation goals. Typically, these watersheds contain a single occurrence of a conservation target, are geographically isolated, and do not lend themselves well to incorporation into a larger landscape. Of the total 74 Conservation Areas in the solution (54 Conservation Landscapes, and 20 smaller, individual watersheds) 27 are entirely within British Columbia, 2 in Alberta, 14 in Montana, 7 in Idaho, 1 in Washington. Seven Conservation Areas were shared between BC and Alberta, 5 between Idaho and Washington, 1 between BC and Montana, 1 between BC and Washington, and 5 between Idaho and Montana. One Conservation Area was common to each of Alberta, BC and Montana, 1 between BC, Idaho and Washington, and 2 between BC, Idaho and Montana. They range in size from 72 hectares (178 acres) to landscapes of 2 million hectares (4.8 million acres). All of the identified Conservation Landscapes meet standards for functional conservation areas, as they include wide gradients of coarse-scale ecological systems and the element occurrences used to identify these landscapes were evaluated for viability. This portfolio represents a first effort at a functional network designed to conserve selected regionalscale species across their range of variability within the ecoregion. Priority Setting: The CRM assessment team made a preliminary evaluation of conservation area priorities based upon available quantitative measures of conservation value and vulnerability. Conservation value was scored for each planning unit watershed based upon the criteria of richness, rarity, diversity, and complementarity. Vulnerability scores were evaluated for individual planning units based on GIS data layers describing a variety of human impacts and threats. The mean conservation value and vulnerability scores of the planning units in each Conservation Area were then used for the purposes of comparison and plotted on a graph of conservation value (y-axis) versus vulnerability (x-axis) and the graph divided into four quadrants. The upper right quadrant, labelled Tier 1, included 11 Conservation Areas with higher conservation value and higher vulnerability – areas that may be considered highest priority sites for conservation. The 43 Conservation Areas that fell within the upper left quadrant of higher conservation value but lower vulnerability were labelled as Tier 2 sites. Tier 2 sites may represent an excellent conservation opportunity to protect intact landscapes of high conservation value before they become irreversibly impacted by rapidly proliferating threats. Twenty-one Conservation Areas fell into the two quadrants representing lower conservation value with 4 areas of lower conservation value and higher vulnerability being labelled as Tier 3 sites, compared to 17 Tier 4 sites of lower value and lower vulnerability. In order to take advantage of the finer scale at which conservation data was developed, each watershed planning unit was also plotted and compared based on conservation value and vulnerability scores. While the total area of the portfolio is 13,455,793 hectares (33,249,265 acres), the analyses shows that only 1,082,062 hectares (2,673,775 acres), or 4% of the ecoregion, falls into the Tier 1 category. Another 6,909,166 hectares (17,072,549 acres) of the CRM portfolio, or 25.8% of the ecoregion, falls into Tier 2. Only 0.3% or 91,204 portfolio hectares (225,365 acres) are classed as Tier 3, while 31.3% of the ecoregion (8,468,591 hectares/20,925,888 acres) are classed as Tier 4 watersheds. Taking the mean scores of conservation value and vulnerability for each Conservation Areas tended to obscure some of the attributes of the constituent watershed planning units. However, assessing individual watershed planning units did add interpretive power to these results and provided much needed perspective for the scope of the conservation challenge in the CRM ecoregion. For example, the 11 Tier 1 Conservation Areas could be taken on as the initial CRM action sites. However, a more flexible interpretation might involve taking action at Tier 1 watersheds (4% of the ecoregion) wherever they fall within the portfolio. Likewise, as opportunity, leverage and feasibility are assessed, it may be more appropriate to take action at both Tier 1 and 2 watersheds (29.8% of the ecoregion) that fall within the Conservation Areas constituting the optimal, complete ecoregional solution. Threats Assessment: The objectives of the preliminary threats assessment were to: 1) Identify general threats at each conservation area while keeping individual conservation targets in mind; and 2) Assess and describe patterns across multiple portfolio conservation areas. This threats assessment was based on site-specific knowledge of the conservation targets at each of the conservation areas, both from Conservancy, Conservation Data Centre, and Natural Heritage Programs staff, with further review by local experts. Comprehensive assessment of all threats (i.e., stresses and sources of stress) at all conservation areas was beyond the scope of this project. Further work through site conservation planning is needed to update and refine threats to targets at the portfolio conservation areas. The most severe and pervasive threats were identified as incompatible fire management and forestry practices, residential development, invasive species, parasites/pathogens, and recreation uses. These threats were identified as the key sources of stress that are interrupting fundamental ecological processes needed to maintain the conservation targets in the Canadian Rocky Mountains Ecoregion. Conservation Blueprint: The primary product of this ecoregional assessment can be considered a conservation blueprint— a vision for conservation success—to guide public land managers, land and water conservation organizations, private landowners, and others in conserving natural diversity within this ecoregion. The goal is to conserve the entire portfolio of conservation areas, which will require a combination of strategies, including on-theground action at specific conservation areas and multiple-area strategies to abate pervasive threats to targets across the ecoregion. It is certain that the initial prioritization of conservation areas presented in this plan requires further qualitative assessments based on conservation feasibility, opportunity and leverage. These assessments should be designed to yield a suite of action sites that can then serve as a focus for conservation partners in the immediate future. It is also important to note that some areas not currently within the conservation solution presented here may become more attractive possibilities for conservation in the future. Changes in land ownership and land use designations in particular can dramatically alter the landscape of conservation opportunity. However, the CRM assessment presented here will allow conservation practitioners to quickly put these emerging opportunities into the appropriate ecological context and to take actions that are scientifically defensible and result in the most biodiversity conserved. |
