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  • About
  • The Global ETD Search service is a free service for researchers to find electronic theses and dissertations. This service is provided by the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations.
    Our metadata is collected from universities around the world. If you manage a university/consortium/country archive and want to be added, details can be found on the NDLTD website.
1

Principles and Procedures for Place-Based Conservation Planning for Canadian Species at Risk

Sullivan, Shara 05 February 2020 (has links)
Place-based biological conservation planning and recovery delineates “places” – spatial extents with favourable conditions for the recovery and management of multiple species simultaneously. Places represent geographic areas where constituent species are more likely to benefit from a specific set of recovery and management actions. Currently, place-based conservation planning is focused on prioritizing already-identified places. Findlay and McKee (2016) propose an approach to identify and delineate places by grouping geographical units based on species-at-risk (SAR) co-localization in (a) geographical, and (b) threat space. The following research is a practical application of the Findlay-McKee Methodology (FMM), using southern Ontario as a case study. I develop a parameterized algorithm to operationalize the design principles laid out in the FMM. I first define metrics to characterize the variation in SAR overlap and the degree to which sets of SAR share common threats. Next, I explore how the spatial extent of places (place size) changes as a function of tolerance for dissimilarity in both measures. The case study allowed me to evaluate the benefits and limitations of the FMM. I conclude that the FMM has the potential to be a defensible method for characterizing places based on SAR community overlap and inter-species threat similarity. However, the FMM’s applicability is limited by the availability of datasets at an appropriate resolution for analysis; uncertainty in selecting appropriate thresholds of tolerance for dissimilarity; and the criteria used to designate seed planning units. Given the increasing popularity of multi-species and ecosystem level recovery and conservation management, developing an efficient and effective process to guide place selection is crucially important. I recommend further research focus on empirically determining the number of places in a planning region and identifying at what tolerance thresholds places lose their ability to delineate areas where a comparatively small number of recovery actions will confer widespread benefits.

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