Key sites for conservation in Canada: Assessing the distribution and status of Canada’s Key Biodiversity Areas

Background/Question/Methods

Canada is a country with vast and unique landscapes and biodiversity. While some portions of this remain ecologically intact, a significant number of species and ecosystems are threatened. Awareness in Canada has been growing about the need for improved stewardship of lands and waters, with strategies ranging from the expansion of protected areas and other effective area-based conservation measures to Indigenous-led land management, and stronger regulations related to development and land use planning. National area-based conservation targets (e.g. conserving 30% of lands and oceans in Canada by 2030) include considerations of the quality of areas for biodiversity, but information is required to guide protected area planning to achieve effective outcomes. Since 2019, the Key Biodiversity Area (KBA) Canada initiative has been identifying KBAs in Canada to help support conservation planning.

The KBA Canada Coalition has taken a “bottom-up” approach to identifying KBAs, led by regional coordinators and rooted in the ecological expertise of Indigenous and local knowledge holders, academics, government agencies, and non-profit organizations. However, a “top-down” approach – whereby KBA identification is done centrally using pre-existing biodiversity monitoring data repositories – can complement and help prioritize local KBA identification, thus improving cost-efficiency. We present the KBAs identified in Canada using the bottom-up approach, highlighting some of the sites and species identified to date. Moreover, we evaluate the performance of top-down scoping approaches against our bottom-up data, in terms of their accuracy, precision, and taxonomic coverage. Understanding the strengths, distinctiveness, and limits of each method is central to building effective and appropriate KBA identification processes within each national constituency.

Results/Conclusions

Using the bottom-up approach, KBA Canada has identified 489 preliminary KBAs for 392 unique species across the country so far (excluding 450 pre-existing bird KBAs). Un-validated top-down results have greater taxonomic coverage, with upwards of 500 trigger species detected. However, our comparison of the top-down and bottom-up results show that the top-down analyses lack specificity and precision, and that there is a trade-off between higher-specificity and higher-precision methods. We are able to refine top-down scoping analyses by clustering adjacent cells where species are present, achieving marked improvement in specificity but a slight reduction in precision. We discuss the important process outcomes of a bottom-up approach to KBA identification in Canada, including the value added from engaging hundreds of experts, knowledge-holders, stakeholders, and rights-holders in KBA identification. Our results have important implications not only for KBA processes worldwide, but also for the many conservation prioritization approaches that rely on top-down methods.