Grant: Alliance Grants

As a country occupying large intact northern landscapes, Canada has heightened global responsibilities to fight climate change, prevent biodiversity loss, and protect species at risk. Fulfilling these responsibilities requires assessing the cumulative impacts of existing and proposed development, prioritising the protection of areas able to reduce climate impacts, and promoting the conservation of biodiversity including species at risk. Ontario's Far North straddles two distinct ecozones; the Hudson Bay Lowlands (HBL) and the Ontario Shield (OS), representing the world's second largest contiguous peatland and over 65% of the province's forests. These Boreal forest ecozones support rich mammal communities and threatened wildlife, including Woodland caribou (Rangifer tarandus caribou) and wolverine (Gulo gulo). Vegetation community composition is a determinant of carbon cycling and wildlife habitat, and likely is an important indicator of spatial variation in carbon stocks and wildlife populations across the landscape. However, mechanistic linkages among vegetation, carbon stocks, and wildlife habitat are not well understood in Ontario's Far North due to limited and coarse-scale data. Ecosystem service bundles form when services repeatedly co-occur across space and time on the landscape; identifying and understanding areas where both carbon and wildlife are present will help decision makers prioritise conservation of this important northern ecosystem service bundle. Our proposal builds on the most extensive existing wildlife camera dataset spanning Northern Ontario's HBL and OS ecozones and expressly capturing the 'Ring of Fire' proposed mining claims. We will conduct the first co-located sampling in Ontario's Far North of peatland carbon stores, vegetation community composition, and wildlife populations to build mechanistic links among these measures. In doing so our program will also provide important baseline data along with reproducible workflows, which are essential for assessing the cumulative effects of resource extraction activities and provide timely information about this remote northern region prior to anticipated disturbance.