Designing natural heritage systems in southern Ontario using a systematic conservation planning approach

Abstract

Landscape planning in settled landscapes includes identifying larger areas of natural vegetation to be conserved protected and/or managed for various environmental and public services. These "green backbones" of the landscape, called Natural Heritage Systems (NHS) in the settled landscapes of southern Ontario, Canada, should have appropriate land use planning and natural areas management actions and related policies to protect and enhance biodiversity and ecological functions. As such, an NHS should be derived using a rigorous and defensible methodology while ensuring public involvement and input during this process. This paper describes the methodology for regional NHS design currently being implemented by OMNR in collaboration with numerous conservation partners and municipalities in southern Ontario. The methodology combines the principles and methods of landscape planning, conservation planning, and spatial analysis, while ensuring that the process is adaptable and repeatable over time and different scales. For each landscape, explicit and transparent conservation objectives, features and targets are identified based on stakeholder inputs. Numerous conservation and restoration objectives are translated into explicit quantitative targets for each analysis unit, and a mathematical optimization algorithm is used to represent all the targets at minimal cost (least land area). The methodology is illustrated using examples from a pilot study in Ecodistrict 7E-5 with some references to ongoing NHS implementation projects as well as potential applications of this method. © 2012 - Canadian Institute of Forestry.