Cross-boundary Conservation Planning for Boreal Forest Songbirds
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Recent decisions surrounding enforcement of the Migratory Birds Act has raised awareness about declining habitat availability for forest songbirds across the boreal. Many habitat association studies have been done on birds in the boreal yet little effort has been put into synthesizing this information and projecting future conditions for birds. Dr. Bayne is a member of the Technical Committee for the National Boreal Bird-Habitat Modelling Group. This group is in the process of collating the raw data from all point-count surveys done in western Canada over the past 20 years.
The intent of this project is to create a series of regional habitat association models that will then be integrated into ALCES and used for setting habitat thresholds at large spatial scales. Proposed research done by the ILM chair in phase II will be used to “down-weight”, where appropriate, the values of habitats impacted by local and regional scale human impacts. As with the caribou model, we will explore a series of management scenarios across jurisdictional boundaries that consider whether conservation targets can be achieved by allocating reserves to remote northern areas (i.e. boreal shield), areas where the economic return from resource development is lower (i.e. lower oil and gas reserves), and the level of responsibility that each jurisdiction has in maintaining a particular species. This work is being in collaboration with Drs. Dan Mazerolle, Steve Cumming, and Fiona Schmiegelow.