Conservation Ranking of Grizzly Bear Population Units
Wednesday January 15, 2020 12:00pm-1:00pm
The Old Church - Smithers, BC
About this Presentation
British Columbia is part of NatureServe’s western hemisphere-wide network of non-profit conservation programs. NatureServe modified its Element Rank Calculator to enable the assignment of conservation ranks to the Province’s Grizzly Bear Population Units (GBPU). A rank is calculated for each of the Province's 55 GBPUs to reflect population size and trend, genetic and demographic isolation, as well as threats to bears and their habitats. The approach is aligned with COSEWIC, IUCN, NatureServe, and species-level threats analyses used in provincial and national recovery planning processes. This presentation will discuss how the Provincial Grizzly Bear program has updated GBPU ranking using NatureServe methods for species status assessment. The results are being presented as an Environmental Reporting BC indicator, linked to the cumulative effects grizzly bear value assessment protocol and the Province’s Grizzly Bear Management Plan.
About Don Morgan
Don Morgan is a systems ecologist with the BC Ministry of Environment and Climate Change Strategy, Ecosystem Protection and Sustainability Branch, Conservation Sciences. His areas of interest include describing and analyzing socio-ecological systems using scenario planning methods, resource management decision-making, and grizzly bears and salmon habitat conservation assessment. In the past, he has conducted forest and range climate change vulnerability assessments and led the Province’s Northwest Cumulative Effects Pilot project. Currently, he is the provincial lead for Grizzly Bear cumulative effects and conservation assessment, and investigating approaches to assessing the condition of biodiversity in the Province under a changing climate.
He is a Registered Professional Biologist in British Columbia, and has a B.Sc. in wildlife biology and computational mathematics from Trent University, Peterborough, Ontario (1984), a B.Sc. (honours) from Carleton University, Ottawa, Ontario in Quantitative Ecology and Computer Science (1991), and an M.Sc. in Natural Resources and Environmental Studies (biology) from the University of Northern B.C (2011).
Relevance to Northwest BC
The Northwest includes some of the most intact grizzly bear habitats and healthy populations in the Province. However, those grizzly bears in the south-eastern portion of the northwest are facing cumulative stress that could lead to their extirpation. Understanding local threats to bears and how they can be mitigated is critical to ensure their persistence across the Northwest.