A Terrestrial Habitat Map of Atlantic Canada - Project Update

Mark Anderson (The Nature Conservancy) and Kevin McGarigal (UMass Amherst) are leading the NE CSC funded project “A Terrestrial Habitat Map of Atlantic Canada: Extending the Northeast Terrestrial Habitat Map across the border”, which seeks to develop a terrestrial habitat map for the entire area of the USFW’s North Atlantic Landscape Conservation Cooperative (NALCC), extending from the northeastern US into the Canadian Maritimes and southeastern Quebec.

Recently the project PI’s have made strides in creating a classification team consisting of 20 participants from 4 Canadian provinces and NatureServe ecologists, to help develop a consistent classification of the Terrestrial Habitats to be mapped. Anderson and colleagues hosted a steering committee meeting for the classification team in February to review and discuss over 80 datasets collected for the project to date related to natural community and species occurrences in the project area, biophysical attributes of the landscape, ecological land classification in the provinces, and protected areas. 

A day-long in person meeting of the classification team will be held in late April in Fredericton, NB to plan the details of forest and wetland classification and linkage to ecological systems.