National contributions to global ecosystem values

Indigenous-led conservation: Pathways to recovery for the nearly extirpated Klinse-Za mountain caribou

Indigenous Peoples around the northern hemisphere have long relied on caribou for subsistence and for ceremonial and community purposes. Unfortunately, despite recovery efforts by federal and provincial agencies, caribou are currently in decline in many areas across Canada. In response to recent and dramatic declines of mountain caribou populations within their traditional territory, West Moberly First Nations and Saulteau First Nations (collectively, the "Nations") came together to create a new vision for caribou recovery on the lands they have long stewarded and shared. The Nations focused on the Klinse-Za subpopulation, which had once encompassed so many caribou that West Moberly Elders remarked that they were "like bugs on the landscape." The Klinse-Za caribou declined from ~250 in the 1990s to only 38 in 2013, rendering Indigenous harvest of caribou nonviable and infringing on treaty rights to a subsistence livelihood. In collaboration with many groups and governments, this Indigenous-led conservation initiative paired short-term population recovery actions, predator reduction and maternal penning, with long-term habitat protection in an effort to create a self-sustaining caribou population. Here, we review these recovery actions and the promising evidence that the abundance of Klinse-Za caribou has more than doubled from 38 animals in 2013 to 101 in 2021, representing rapid population growth in response to recovery actions. With looming extirpation averted, the Nations focused efforts on securing a landmark conservation agreement in 2020 that protects caribou habitat over a 7986-km² area. The Agreement provides habitat protection for >85% of the Klinse-Za subpopulation (up from only 1.8% protected pre-conservation agreement) and affords moderate protection for neighboring caribou subpopulations (29%-47% of subpopulation areas, up from 0%-20%). This Indigenous-led conservation initiative has set both the Indigenous and Canadian governments on the path to recover the Klinse-Za subpopulation and reinstate a culturally meaningful caribou hunt. This effort highlights how Indigenous governance and leadership can be the catalyst needed to establish meaningful conservation actions, enhance endangered species recovery, and honor cultural connections to now imperiled wildlife.

Maximizing the effectiveness of national commitments to protected area expansion for conserving biodiversity and ecosystem carbon under climate change

Global commitments to protected area expansion should prioritize opportunities to protect climate refugia and ecosystems which store high levels of irrecoverable carbon, as key components of an effective response to biodiversity loss and climate change. The United States and Canada are responsible for one-sixth of global greenhouse gas emissions but hold extensive natural ecosystems that store globally significant above- and below-ground carbon. Canada has initiated a process of protected area network expansion in concert with efforts at reconciliation with Indigenous Peoples, and acknowledged nature-based solutions as a key aspect of climate change mitigation. The US, although not a party to global biodiversity conventions, has recently committed to protecting 30% of its extent by 2030 and achieving the UNFCCC Paris Agreement's mitigation targets. The opportunities afforded by these dual biodiversity conservation and climate commitments require coordinated national and regional policies to ensure that new protected areas maximize biodiversity-focused adaptation and nature-based mitigation opportunities. We address how global commitments can best inform national policy initiatives which build on existing agency mandates for regional planning and species conservation. Previous analyses of global conservation priorities under climate change have been tenuously linked to policy contexts of individual nations and have lacked information on refugia due to limitations of globally available datasets. Comparison and synthesis of predictions from a range of recently developed refugia metrics allow such data to inform planning despite substantial uncertainty arising from contrasting model assumptions and inputs. A case study for endangered species planning for old-forest-associated species in the US Pacific Northwest demonstrates how regional planning can be nested hierarchically within national biodiversity-focused adaptation and nature-based mitigation strategies which integrate refugia, connectivity, and ecosystem carbon metrics to holistically evaluate the role of different land designations and where carbon mitigation and protection of biodiversity's resilience to climate change can be aligned.

Evaluating policy-relevant surrogate taxa for biodiversity conservation: a case study from British Columbia, Canada

Conservation efforts often lead to a small proportion of species receiving a disproportionate amount of attention. This bias in funding may help or hinder broader goals of biodiversity conservation depending on the surrogacy value of the well-funded species. Surrogate species are selected to represent other taxa in a shared environment when it would be costly or impractical to obtain information on individual taxa. We compared the surrogacy value of common groups of taxa implicated in conservation — game species, carnivores, non-game species, and other species. Using a publicly available data set of species–habitat associations, we compared the surrogacy value for 1012 species and 64 habitat types in British Columbia, Canada. We used a conditional entropy metric to quantify pairwise associations between species via their occurrence in different habitat types. Our analysis reveals that game and non-game species surrogacy groups do not significantly differ in either the frequency of captured pairwise associations or their coverage of species. These results suggest that funding game species conservation is likely conferring some benefits to non-game species, but optimal habitat-based conservation outcomes will come from a combination of taxa. This analysis provides an important step in influencing management decisions for the preservation of biodiversity in British Columbia.