Since the millennium, the population in the Montreal Metropolitan Community (MMC), in Quebec, Canada, has been increasing and development continues to push further out into areas which were once a rural mosaic of agriculture and forest. In response to this, the municipalities that make up the MMC have prepared a planning process for land use and development that, in part, addresses greenspace conservation in the region. This plan aims to conserve 17% of the total MMC area as forest by 2025. There are however, no provincial norms for terrestrial conservation (except in the case of wetlands), and therefore no consistent method to identify forests of higher conservation value in the region. Municipalities will often contract environmental consulting companies to inventory forest stands, however an assessment of ecosystem services is rarely incorporated into their methodologies. Forest surveys that omit ecosystem services from their valuation ignore the realities of conservation in the peri-urban landscape where preservation goals must be weighed against development pressures. We use St Lazare, a municipality at the western edge of the MMC, as a test case for the development of a standardized conservation index that reflects provision of ecosystem services. Using publicly available geospatial data augmented by field measurements, we combined 12 environmental and landscape variables in a measure of conservation value that gauges provision of ecosystem services valued by local citizens: a) water retention, b) biodiversity and c) recreational amenities. Finally, we compare our site valuations against those done by a consulting company, which did not consider ecosystem services.
Results/Conclusions
When ecosystem services are considered in valuation of forest stands for conservation, the results differ from traditional valuations based on a simple combination of botanical, environmental and landscape variables. In our method, forest stands that better match the municipality's conservation priorities are selected. Furthermore, this strategy can be scaled up to other municipalities and tailored to match their conservation priorities, while still providing a consistent, standardized method for determining conservation value across the region.