Letter Re: Canadian Boreal Forests

It took a bit of digging, but I have found the letter released which I referred to in yesterday’s post.

See this site: Canada’s Boreal Forest, hosted on the Boreal Songbird Initiative website. The letter itself is a 37 page PDF in English, and French. The letter is 1 1/2 pages in length, with 2 1/2 pages of footnotes and 33 pages for the over 1,500 signatures.

It was released yesterday simultaneously in Ottawa and Seattle by:

• Dr. David Schindler, Professor of Biology, University of Alberta
• Dr. Terry Root, Stanford University Professor and author of multiple Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports
• Dr. Marcel Darveau, Senior Biologist, Ducks Unlimited Canada
• Larry Innes, Acting Executive Director, Canadian Boreal Initiative
• Dr. Jeffrey Wells, Senior Scientist, Boreal Songbird Initiative
• Dr. Jeremy Kerr, Associate professor – Ecology, University of Ottawa
• Steven Kallick, Project Director, International Boreal Conservation Campaign

From the letter:

The relatively intact state of Canada’s northern Boreal regionprovides an opportunity to implement conservation strategies to protect the region’s ecological integrity. The field of conservation biology identifies four objectives that must be achieved to ensure the longterm viability of an ecosystem: 1) all native ecosystem types must be represented in protected areas; 2) populations of all native species must be maintained in natural patterns of abundance and distribution; 3) ecological processes such as hydrological processes must be maintained; and 4) the resilience to short-term and long-term environmental change must be maintained. Achieving these objectives requires an extensive interconnected network of protected areas and sustainable management of the surrounding areas. Reviews of previous conservation planning initiatives provide further direction by indicating that protected areas should cover in the range of half of the landscape to achieve the objectives listed above.

[see the original letter for footnote references]