Caribou are extremely sensitive to habitat fragmentation
Credit: Innu Nation
Just came across an interesting and useful report that was released on Monday by the U.N. Secretariat for the Convention on Biodiversity (CBD). The report is called Forest Resilience, Biodiversity, and Climate Change and can be downloaded here:
http://www.cbd.int/doc/publications/cbd-ts-43-en.pdf
From the CBD press release:
"Forest Biodiversity provides an "Insurance Policy" against Climate Change
Montreal, 26 October 2009 -Maintaining and restoring biodiversity in forests promotes their resilience to human-induced pressures and is therefore an essential "insurance policy" to safeguard against climate-change impacts, according to a study released yesterday by the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD).
Because primary forests are generally more resilient than modified natural forests or plantations, it is crucial that policies and measures that promote their protection yield both biodiversity conservation and climate change mitigation benefits, in addition to a full array of ecosystem services.
Those are among the findings of the CBD Technical Series No. 43 on Forest Resilience, Biodiversity and Climate Change, launched on the margins of the XIII° World Forestry Congress in Buenos Aires, Argentina. The study, a synthesis of the relationship between biodiversity, resilience and stability in forest ecosystems, provides compelling rationale for the conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity for any forest-based climate change mitigation and adaptation efforts."
A few of the report's recommendations that were particularly relevant to the Boreal include:
- Maintain connectivity across forest landscapes by reducing fragmentation, recovering lost habitats (forest types), expanding protected area networks, and establishing ecological corridors;
- Maintain functional diversity and eliminate the conversion of diverse natural forests to monotypic or reduced-species plantations;
- Maintain biodiversity at all scales (stand, landscape, bioregional) and of all elements (genes, species, communities) by, for example, protecting tree populations which are isolated, disjunct, or at margins of their distributions, source habitats, and refuge networks. These populations are most likely to represent pre-adapted gene pools for responding to climate change and could form core populations as conditions change.
- Ensure that there are national and regional networks of scientifically designed, comprehensive, adequate, and representative protected areas. Build these networks into national and regional planning for large-scale landscape connectivity.
