Hello all,

We hope that you had a restful holiday season and a bright start to 2021. We’ve had a productive start of the year with a handful of KBA proposals in British Columbia ready for review and plans to hire a regional coordinator for Ontario in the next couple of months (see below).

Updates:

• We’ve created a public dashboard with a map of potential KBAs being identified across Canada. This dashboard is updated in real time, and sites will be added and removed as they are proposed and reviewed by experts, so be sure to check back. (Large geographies lacking KBA coordinates may have sites in progress that are not yet uploaded to our database. This dashboard also excludes KBAs that have been identified for birds, as Birds Canada is reassessing all existing Important Bird and Biodiversity Areas using KBA criteria).

• KBA Canada Coordinator, Dr. Ciara Raudsepp-Hearne was recently interviewed for CBC’s Quirks and Quarks, where she and host Bob McDonald discussed how Key Biodiversity Areas can guide Canada’s goal of protecting 30% of lands and seas by 2030. While this target represents an important step for conservation, Ciara emphasized that we want more than just 30% – we want to preserve biodiversity and ecosystem services. Listen to the interview here.
• We are hiring a KBA Coordinator for Ontario! If you or someone you know is an experienced biodiversity scientist familiar with Ontario species and ecosystems, and looking for challenging work that involves data, networking and project management, we’d love to hear from you. Find out about this one-year position here, and share widely with your networks.
• A review is underway to assess which of Canada’s Important Bird and Biodiversity Areas (IBAs) could become KBAs – and we need your help! The purpose of this review is to have experts confirm and potentially enhance existing bird data, as well as suggest new potential KBAs triggered by birds to the list. If you have any data that you think may not be included in the IBA database (check sites here), please email Amanda Bichel of Birds Canada (abichel@birdscanada.org) for more details.
• In case you missed it, don’t forget to check out the new Birds Canada Story Map showcasing two of Canada’s outstanding candidate KBAs.

Webinars:

Save the date for the next webinar in our series:

Title: Methods, tools and data for KBA identification and beyond

Date and time: February 18, 2021 at 12pm ET

Description:

Key Biodiversity Area (KBA) assessment work requires lots of data, knowledge, and methodological tools, and in turn also produces a lot of data and information that is broadly relevant to conservation. Join us to learn about the data that we have amassed within the Canadian KBA initiative, how we have used it to understand Canadian biodiversity at the national and subnational scales, and what products are becoming freely available to the conservation community through this work. Chloé Debyser, Lead Data Analyst in the KBA program at WCS Canada, will provide an overview of the KBA program’s data infrastructure and discuss how she is using it to scope potential KBAs throughout Canada. Christine Terwissen, National Coordinator of the Ecosystem Based Automated Range map (EBAR) program at NatureServe Canada, will present how her team assembled Canadian biodiversity datasets that are being used to develop hundreds of range maps for species across Canada. Juan Zuloaga, a post-doctoral fellow at McGill University (working with Professor Andrew Gonzalez), will present a tool that they developed to identify the most likely places for KBAs on a landscape.

Link to join: http://bit.ly/KBAwebinar5

Past Webinars:

A recording of Dr. Jeffrey Wall and Roger Lewis’ presentation on Envisioning Compatibilities between Mi’kmaq Environmental Value and KBA Criteria in Mi’kma’ki can be found here, along with all other webinars in the our series.

Due to technical difficulties during the webinar, Jeff was unable to share a couple of video clips with our attendees. You can view those videos here:

• Roger Lewis on resource use in water ways.
• Roger Lewis on mobility in waterways.  
• Albert Marshall on expansive views on Two-Eyed Seeing.

As always, please get in touch if you have questions or if you want to learn more.

Ciara Raudsepp-Hearne

Canada Key Biodiversity Areas Coordinator / Coordonnatrice Zones Clés pour la Biodiversité