Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

Environmental pressures, such as oil and gas infrastructure, agricultural lands and urban sprawl, are the actions taken by humans with the potential to harm nature. These pressures are changing spatially and temporally, with profound implications for the planets biodiversity. For instance, environmental pressures are now so ubiquitous that they are precipitating a new epoch, dubbed the Anthropocene, and concurrently a global mass extinction crisis. Through an interdisciplinary project termed the human footprint, colleagues and I have provided the highest resolution and most complete view of how eight in-situ environmental pressures are changing across Earths land areas. This work has led to a number of important discoveries. For instance, the human footprint is increasing in most places, and 75% of the planet is now experiencing measurable environmental pressures. Moreover, pressures are perversely intense in places that house high concentrations of biodiversity. Conversely, Earths last wild landscapes are primarily in high latitudes and desert regions, as well as some tropical forest areas. However, this improved understanding of how the human footprint is changing has raised as many questions as it has answered. This Discovery Grant will fund a student-led research program to answer some of the most pressing among these questions. Specifically, we will use spatial analyses and statistical modelling to bring together a range of large data sets with the aim of improving our understanding of how environmental pressures interact to drive biodiversity declines, and whether specific tipping points exist between accumulating pressures and biodiversity declines. Moreover, my students and I will develop new refined maps of cumulative pressures at the Canadian national scale, as the global maps appear to poorly represent pressures in Canada, as well as future projections of these pressures at the global and Canadian scale. In combination, this proposed research program innovates across two major themes relating to the ecology of human-dominated environments. First, this project will present an entirely novel extension to the nascent field of cumulative pressure mapping, substantially improving its ability to relate cumulative environmental pressures to their impacts on biodiversity. Second, this project will develop novel methods for projecting future expansion of the human footprint and contraction in wilderness areas. This will provide crucial information for Canada, where large scale oil and gas developments are underway, and much of the north is becoming increasingly suitable for human uses. Moreover, our maps of habitat disturbance will provide key information for conservation planning in Canada, which has ambitious policy to expand protected areas, helping to minimize future biodiversity declines.