National Agri-Environmental Standards Initiative (NAESI): Habitat Mapping and Landscape Analysis to Support the NAESI Biodiversity Standards Project

Client: Environment Canada

As part of the multi-year NAESI Biodiversity Standards Project, Spatialworks was asked to calculate and map a suite of landscape analysis measures to apply to the current landscape as well as baseline Potential Natural Vegetation and other predicted scenarios (also created by Spatialworks under other NAESI projects) to support habitat-based biodiversity standards.

Spatialworks programmed over 50 different measures into a suite of algorithms that could be applied to the various landscape scenarios in pilot areas across Canada. Included were measures of:

• Landscape pattern (e.g. forest patch size, shape)
• Complementation (e.g. natural vegetation within varying distances of wetlands or agricultural fields)
• Riparian habitat quantity/quality
• Road density
• Species richness based on habitat suitability

Under the same project, Spatialworks coded and mapped detailed habitat suitability models for over 30 species based on literature and written descriptions by other contracted scientists performing population viability analyses.