Designing an ecologically connected landscape in the Northwest Boreal Region of Alaska and Canada

Boreal regions are warming at twice the rate of the global average and are facing unprecedented and increasing global demand for natural resources, yet also have less urbanization and development and therefore fewer barriers to implementing landscape conservation design. The Northwest Boreal LCC (NWB LCC) has the opportunity to guide planning and design to plan for future social-ecological changes beforethey occur.  This forward-thinking, proactive approach to landscape conservation will help ensure that ecological and human communities will have greater capacity to adapt to climate and other landscape changes. Collectively, we have an opportunity to shape the future of this region, rather than repeating the mistakes of the past.

Across the vast and remote trans-boundary region, the NWB LCC is integrating coarse-scale conservation targets such as ecosystem processes, services and landscape features with fine-scale species-level conservation targets to inform the identification of priority areas for conservation action as part of a holistic and international landscape conservation design process. We will give an overview of how the NWB LCC is approaching landscape conservation design from both US and Canadian perspectives, and will discuss how the NWB LCC can use LCD to guide the sustainable development of the region.