Landscape 3 - Prairies - NSERC ResNet

LANDSCAPE OVERVIEW

Canada’s prairie landscapes (i.e., Saskatchewan, Alberta, Manitoba), are home to verdant wetlands, lucrative and expanding agriculture, multiple First Nations, and growing urban centres. For example, the prairies are hugely important to Canadian agriculture, and indeed Canada is the world’s fifth largest exporter of agriculture and agri-food products. Likewise, prairie landscapes are also essential habitat to numerous migratory birds, mammals, and aquatic species, and over the last half century. a significant portion of this habitat has been converted, through land use change, from wetlands to agricultural and residential lands. As such, landowners, agricultural producers, conservationists, and water resource management agencies face diverse and often conflicting set of values and priorities for landscape management in the prairies.

CHALLENGES FACING CANADA’S PRAIRIE LANDSCAPES

Trade-offs are not clear between conflicting land use regimes
People are not always working with the same understanding of what constitutes wetlands and how to prioritize their conservation
People are also operating with different understandings of agricultural practices and their impacts

Conflict among stakeholder groups is escalating, making collaboration difficult
Historical legacies of land development make baselines difficult to identify

RESEARCH OBJECTIVES

Explore decision-making among farmers and other land-owners
Identify existing trade-offs among key ecosystem services at the landscape scale
Identify future scenarios of social-ecological changes to ecosystem services
Identify criteria by which collaborative decision making for prairie landscapes can proceed

EXPECTED OUTCOMES

Improved collaboration among sectors- Policy guidance for reducing conflict
Criteria for future management
Greater public awareness of the ecosystem services provided by the wetlands region and their value to society