Grant: Strategic Network Grants Program

A Canadian future of shared health, prosperity, and resilience will depend on our ability to manage ecosystemsand all the benefits they provide for human well-being now and in the future. Indeed, the central challenge ofour lifetime is to meet our needs for food, energy, and other critical ecosystem services now withoutundermining the ability to provide these services into the future, even as we face looming global environmentalchallenges. Our network of researchers will monitor and model ecosystem services - the benefits people obtainfrom nature - in a series of working landscapes across Canada. Working landscapes - land actively used forproduction of resources such as food, fish, and forest products - are of particular importance for theircontributions to Canadians' wellbeing. Historically, the focus in working landscapes has been on the cheap,reliable, and efficient production of individual ES such as food, energy, or timber. Studies of the otherecosystems services provided by these landscapes, including carbon storage, flood regulation, recreation,spiritual enhancement, have lagged behind. Our network will measure a broad variety of ecosystem services ina set of six working landscapes across Canada, with the goal of scaling up the understanding we gain throughthese six landscape studies to deliver an ES dashboard for Canada that can be used to measure our progresstowards sustainability and resilience of working landscapes for all Canadians.