Saving nature: WWF research highlights Canada’s best spots for ecological restoration
After a long drive on busy highways, through neighborhoods of large suburban homes and paved driveways, Tomlinson Park is an unlikely oasis of lush greenery.
Located in Markham, Ontario on the northeastern outskirts of Toronto, the park borders the Rouge River and is the site of a major ecological restoration effort just steps away from people’s homes.
On a cloudy day in June, hundreds of volunteers were planting trees and shrubs in an effort to restore a bare section of the park.
“In 10 to 15 years they should get to 20, 30, even 50 feet [15 metres]. And it should look like a beautiful, thriving forest,” said Nishad Islam, environmental project coordinator at the Friends of the Rouge Watershed, who coordinated the event.
“And hopefully it will be home to many endangered species, several species of turtles and also salamanders.”
The Friends have a decades-long history in this part of the Greater Toronto Area and advocate for the nearby Rouge National Urban Park – the largest urban park in Canada, more than 19 times the size of Stanley Park in Vancouver.
Many conservationists consider it one of the best examples of wildlife restoration in the country – home to 1,700 plant and animal species, 42 species at risk, a place where students learn to camp and people hike and picnic – while also being surrounded by millions people in Canada’s largest metropolitan area through which Highway 401, the busiest in North America, runs.
With restoration work, “we’re essentially just making it a more natural, bigger space for those endangered species to come, and also for people to kind of enjoy this beautiful area that we have,” Islam said.
The work here is part of efforts across Canada to restore nature and bring back biodiversity – as governments, communities and researchers recognize the importance of green spaces in fighting climate change and preparing for extreme weather.
The work is supported by new research from the World Wildlife Fund showing that areas of greatest importance for ecological restoration are also close to where people live, especially in southern Ontario, Manitoba and Quebec.
A global action to save nature
Unlike environmental protection, which involves creating parks and conservation areas to protect natural areas, restoration involves moving into degraded areas and planting trees and shrubs to restore the land, approximating what it once was before human activities altered it .
Restoration is key to Canada’s efforts to reverse biodiversity loss – now part of the country’s international commitments, following the COP15 UN Biodiversity Conference hosted in Montreal last December.
Countries around the world have reached a historic agreement to save nature and set goals to protect and restore ecosystems, and observers want Canada to lead by example as the host country.
Research by the World Wildlife Fund highlights key areas for ecological restoration work.
“When we left COP15 in December, we saw really ambitious goals and targets that the Government of Canada committed to,” said James Snider, vice president of science, knowledge and innovation at WWF Canada and co-author of the study.
“But now that we have these ambitious goals and targets, we need to actually implement them.”
Using field and satellite data, researchers calculated the carbon storage potential and biodiversity benefits for Canada’s areas that have been transformed by humans.
The study considered three different potential restoration targets – from 5 million hectares to 15 million hectares (the latter representing a target to restore 30 percent of Canada’s converted landscapes). In all of these scenarios, the key areas for recovery were in southern Ontario, Quebec and Manitoba – also the places most altered by human activity.
Snider says this means restoring those areas has direct benefits for people, such as protecting water resources, providing clean air and preventing flooding.
“It’s not just the people who live right next to those areas that benefit from having those natural areas, but more generally the people who live, you know, throughout the region,” Snider said.
Finding land – and people – for restoration work
But the location of the tree planting event along the Rouge also showed the challenge of restoring so close to the people. The WWF’s analysis did not include urban areas with residential development, as it does not suggest that people are being displaced for nature.
But accessing land to recover can be a challenge. Michael Petryk of Tree Canada, a national organization that helped organize the event in Markham, said groups like his have to get creative to find spaces to recover as there is pressure from the need to build more homes and farms. to build.
Aside from that, he also pointed out that there is simply a shortage of skilled workers to carry out the restoration, something he hopes large voluntary tree-planting events can counteract.
“This is a great opportunity to introduce people to forestry in the city, that it’s a career, maybe they can talk about it with their kids, get people into it,” he said.
Restore the land and the species will come
Jill Crosthwaite is working on another restoration project, on a small but ecologically crucial island in Lake Erie, about 250 miles west of Toronto. Pelee Island is an important staging point for migratory birds, welcoming over 300 bird species on their journeys.
The Nature Conservancy of Canada, a conservation group that acquires land to protect and restore it, has restored the island’s coastlines, forests and wetlands.
“When we work somewhere like Pelee Island, it already has amazing diversity. It has a lot of species that are quite rare and not found in many other places in Canada,” Crosthwaite said.
“A lot of those species really crave more habitat, so they’re going to move in there and start using it pretty quickly.”
Crosthwaite said the NCC is locating land near key habitats — such as forests and wetlands — and working to restore them based on what those nearby habitats look like. Much of the land they work on has been converted by humans for over a century – but once restored, it may take just a year or two for animal and bird species to begin moving again.
There are also many benefits to humans – otherwise known as ‘ecosystem services’. Most importantly, restored wetlands hold rain and control the amount of flooding, and the plants in those wetlands help filter the water and clean up contaminants like fertilizer before it all flows into the lake, Crosthwaite said.
The new habitats could also be places for people to visit.
“That really gives people a place where they can go for a walk, they can move, they can connect with nature,” Crosthwaite said.
“They can see things they might not have been able to see.”
