Hello all,

This will be our last update for 2020. We look forward to sharing progress and stories about KBAs in Canada with you in the New Year. There are many reasons to hope that 2021 will offer us some relief and light, and hopefully also progress on issues that we care deeply about. In the meantime, may you all have a restful holiday to round out this challenging year.

Updates:

• Birds Canada has developed a visual story map packed with information about the KBA program in Canada, and showcasing two shoe-in candidate KBAs that have existed as Important Bird and Biodiversity Areas (IBAs) for decades: the Fraser River Estuary and Long Point in Ontario. Take a look, and please share widely. Work is ongoing to add non-bird taxa to these sites and to assess whether they meet KBA criteria and thresholds.

• A series of plant-focused workshops have wrapped up in BC, resulting in the identification of many new KBAs across the province, including in hotspots such as the Okanagan Valley and the Gulf Islands. Thanks to the fantastic group of experts that have contributed to this work and especially to the BC Conservation Data Center (CDC) for continuing to support KBA identification and delineation in BC. All the sites will be reviewed by additional experts, rights holders and stakeholders.
• KBA Canada has data sharing agreements with all of the Provincial and Territorial CDCs. In preparation for the upcoming step of sharing project outputs publicly, we have been consulting with the CDCs to ensure that KBA maps and spatial layers are appropriate for each jurisdiction, and specifically for sensitive data (e.g. locations of harvested or persecuted species). We will post information on our website about how we manage sensitive data in the New Year.
• We plan to hire a coordinator early in 2021 to lead the participatory process of identifying and delineating KBAs in Ontario. Keep an eye out for this announcement and please spread the word, we’ll be looking for someone for a full-time 1-year position to take on this challenging and important work.

Webinars:

Our most recent webinar presentation was given by Andrew Couturier (Birds Canada) on the relationship between KBAs and Important Bird and Biodiversity Areas (IBAs). You can find a recording of the webinar HERE.

Save the date for the next webinar in our series:

Title: Envisioning Compatibilities between Mi’kmaq Environmental Values and KBA Criteria in Mi’kma’ki

Date and time: January 21, 2021 at 12pm ET

Description: This webinar will be co-presented by Roger Lewis, Mi’kmaq Cultural Heritage Curator at the Nova Scotia Museum, and WCS Canada/U of Guelph post-doctoral fellow, Dr. Jeffrey Wall. Roger Lewis’ research interests lie in Mi’kmaq knowledge-practices tied to land and resource use. Dr. Wall is an ethnobiologist currently working with Conservation through Reconciliation Partnership, U of Guelph and WCS Canada to develop a conceptual framework capable of envisioning win-win scenarios between First Nations environmental values and biodiversity conservation priorities from the global level. In this webinar, they will share how they are employing a cultural landscapes perspective to explore compatibilities between Mi’kmaq Peoples’ legacy of and value for environmental health in Mi’kma’ki and emerging Key Biodiversity Areas in Mi’kmaq traditional territory.   

Link to join: https://bit.ly/KBAwebinar4

s 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