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”Extending the Northeast Terrestrial Habitat Map to Atlantic Canada"

Wednesday, April 1, 2015 | 11:30 am
134 Morrill Science Center Conference Room
Mark Anderson Mark Anderson, TNC
Director of Conservation Science, The Nature Conservancy’s Eastern U.S. Region

The Northeast US and Atlantic Canada share many of the same types of forests, wetlands, and natural communities, and from a species perspective the region is one contiguous forest. However, resources are classified and mapped differently on the two sides of the border creating challenges for species modeling and ecosystem evaluation. To remedy this, ecologists from The Nature Conservancy collaborated with a committee of scientists from various Canadian institutions to produce the first international map of terrestrial habitats for the region. The project used extensive spatial data on geology, soils, landforms, wetlands, elevation and climate, Additionally, all four provinces contributed spatially comprehensive forest inventory data consisting of millions of polygons depicting the exact tree composition of individual forest stands, and the Atlantic Conservation Data Centre contributed spatial locations of over 16,000 species locations including herbaceous plants, herptiles, mammals and birds. The resulting map will be integrated with US map and released as a single dataset in 2015. On this webinar we will review the methods and examine some of the interesting findings. This project was jointly funded by the NE CSC and the North Atlantic Landscape Conservation Cooperative.

Mark Anderson provides ecological analysis and develops landscape–scale assessment tools for conservation efforts across eight ecoregions. He has worked as an ecologist for over twenty years and is co-author of the National Vegetation Classification as well as numerous journal articles on biodiversity conservation.