Media
Justina ECO 2014
WCS Canada Executive Director Dr. Justina Ray speaks at a the celebration of the 20th anniversary of Ontario's Environmental Bill of Rights, a unique and important piece of legislation that provides Ontarians with a voice in matters of policy that affect the environment. This event took place in Toronto on February 12th, 2014.
Justina Ray - Caribou designatable units in Canada and implications for assessment and recovery
At the 14th North American Caribou Workshop, Justina Ray discusses the twelve designatable units (DUs) for caribou in Canada, and how COSEWIC developed them. The opportunities, challenges and uncertainties of working towards caribou recovery nationally are also addressed. Justina C. Ray is with the Wildlife Conservation Society Canada.
Justina Ray - Challenging Assumptions and Definitions of Extinction and Recovery . . .
Justina Ray - Challenging Assumptions and Definitions of Extinction and Recovery in Endangered Species Conservation Thinking Extinction 2013 Justina Ray, Wildlife Conservation Society Canada Recorded at Laurentian University, 14 November 2013
Dr. Justina Ray - Science and the Endangered Species Act - OESAC 2013
Dr. Justina Ray, Executive Director and Senior Scientist with Wildlife Conservation Society Canada discusses the 'promises and pitfalls' when dealing with the science behind the Endangered Species Act (2007), as well as discussing specific aspects of how the Act was designed and how it is being implemented. The inaugural Ontario Endangered Species Act Conference was held in Toronto at the Royal Ontario Museum, April 8-9, 2013.To learn more about this conference, have a look at the other OESAC 2013 videos. For information on future conferences, visit: http://www.endangeredspeciesconference.com.
Noninvasive Survey Methods for Carnivores
Island Press
1597261203
The status of many carnivore populations is of growing concern to scientists and conservationists, making the need for data pertaining to carnivore distribution, abundance, and habitat use ever more pressing. Recent developments in “noninvasive” research techniques—those that minimize disturbance to the animal being studied—have resulted in a greatly expanded toolbox for the wildlife practitioner. Presented in a straightforward and readable style, Noninvasive Survey Methods for Carnivores is a comprehensive guide for wildlife researchers who seek to conduct carnivore surveys using the most up-to-date scientific approaches. Twenty-five experts from throughout North America discuss strategies for implementing surveys across a broad range of habitats, providing input on survey design, sample collection, DNA and endocrine analyses, and data analysis. Photographs from the field, line drawings, and detailed case studies further illustrate on-the-ground application of the survey methods discussed. Coupled with cutting-edge laboratory and statistical techniques, which are also described in the book, noninvasive survey methods are effi cient and effective tools for sampling carnivore populations. Noninvasive Survey Methods for Carnivores allows practitioners to carefully evaluate a diversity of detection methods and to develop protocols specific to their survey objectives, study area, and species of interest. It is an essential resource for anyone interested in the study of carnivores, from scientists engaged in primary research to agencies or organizations requiring carnivore detection data to develop management or conservation plans.
Large Carnivores and the Conservation of Biodiversity
Island Press
1559630809
Large Carnivores and the Conservation of Biodiversity brings together more than thirty leading scientists and conservation practitioners to consider a key question in environmental conservation: Is the conservation of large carnivores in ecosystems that evolved with their presence equivalent to the conservation of biological diversity within those systems? Building their discussions from empirical, long-term data sets, contributors including James A. Estes, David S. Maehr, Tim McClanahan, Andr?s J. Novaro, John Terborgh, and Rosie Woodroffe explore a variety of issues surrounding the link between predation and biodiversity: What is the evidence for or against the link? Is it stronger in marine systems? What are the implications for conservation strategies? Large Carnivores and the Conservation of Biodiversity is the first detailed, broad-scale examination of the empirical evidence regarding the role of large carnivores in biodiversity conservation in both marine and terrestrial ecosystems. It contributes to a much more precise and global understanding of when, where, and whether protecting and restoring top predators will directly contribute to the conservation of biodiversity. Everyone concerned with ecology, biodiversity, or large carnivores will find this volume a unique and thought-provoking analysis and synthesis.
Caribou and the North: A Shared Future
by Monte Hummel, Justina C. Ray
Dundurn
1550028391
"If the caribou die, then we die." These few words speak eloquently to the significance of caribou for northern peoples. They were spoken not by a wise old chief, but by a 13-year-old Dene youth in 2007 during a hearing regarding uranium exploration on the caribou wintering grounds. Right now there is urgent, widespread concern about the future of the most central of species: caribou. Caribou and the North brings both the facts and the feelings of the current situation to a North American readership. The writers look at why we need to conserve the caribou, the threats that have faced caribou in the past, present, and future, and the actions that we can take. Also included is an appendix with up-to-date information on the range, movements, habitats, numbers, population trends, and key threats to caribou in North America.
Rescaling the Human Footprint: A tool for conservation planning at an ecoregional scale
Published by Landscape and Urban Planning
2008 Measuring and mapping human influence at the global scale suffers from problems of accuracy and resolution. To evaluate the magnitude of this problem we mapped the Human Footprint (HF) for the Northern Appalachian/Acadian ecoregion at a 90-m resolution using best available data on human settlement, access, land use change, and electrical power infrastructure. Such a map measures the magnitude of human transformation of a landscape, scaled between Human Footprint scores of 0 and 100. Comparison with a 1-km resolution Global Human Footprint map revealed similar spatial patterns of human influence. The correlation between HF scores, however, declined with the size of the area compared, with the rank correlation between ecoregional and global HF scores ranging between 0.67 for 100% of the ecoregion and 0.41 for 0.1% of the ecoregion. This indicates that rescaling the map to a finer resolution leads to improvements that increase as the planning area becomes smaller. The map reveals that 46% of the ecoregion has HF ≤ 20 (compared to 59% in the global analysis) and 34% had HF > 40 (compared to 21% in the global analysis). These results demonstrate the benefit of performing region-scale Human Footprint mapping to support conservation-based land use planning at the ecoregional to the local scale. This exercise also provides a data framework with which to model regionally plausible Future Human Footprint scenarios. These and other benefits of producing a regional-scale Human Footprint must be carefully weighed against the costs involved, in light of the region's conservation planning needs.
URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0169204608000637
Noninvasive Research and Carnivore Conservation
Published by Noninvasive Survey Methods for Carnivores
Influence of Timber Extraction Routes on Central African Small-Mammal Communities, Forest Structure, and Tree Diversity
Published by Conservation Biology
2000 Despite increasing pressure to harvest timber from African tropical forests, the short- and long-term ecological effects of qualitative and quantitative variation in extraction practices rarely have been examined. At a site in the southwestern Central African Republic, we surveyed rodent and tree communities and vegetation structure in unlogged forest and along skid trails and secondary and primary access roads at 12 and 19 years after logging. The most important source of variation among transects was the type of logging road: primary and secondary access roads showed the greatest change and skid trails the least. An intercorrelated suite of changes occurred along the margins of the roads, including changes in rodent community composition, increases in rodent abundance and diversity, changes in the height distribution of rodent abundance, increases in understory foliage density, and decreases in sapling density and tree species richness. Ecological changes along the secondary roads were nearly as strong as those along primary roads, despite the fact that secondary roads had been abandoned immediately after logging, whereas primary roads had been traveled up to the time of the research. Continuing edge-induced effects along graded road margins at between 12 and 19 years after logging were indicated by differences in tree species composition, sapling and tree densities, and understory density. Our results support conclusions of increased disturbance to rainforest communities with increasingly destructive road construction techniques and suggest that canopy damage rather than stem damage is the most appropriate measure of logging damage. Although minimizing the length of access roads is important in reducing ecological effects, it should not be achieved at the expense of increased canopy damage. Rodent communities appear to be an easily measured indicator of these ecological changes and may be responsive to landscape-level changes in forest cover and degradation.
URL: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1523-1739.2000.99070.x/full
Conservation Planning with Large Carnivores
Published by Landscape-scale Conservation Planning
2010 While large mammals are often important targets of conservation activities in their own right, they can serve as effective tools for designing conservation landscapes and management measures at the human–wildlife interface. This chapter explores the potential role of large mammals in conservation planning in the Northern Appalachians/Acadian ecoregion, exploring two major questions: What can we learn from the past about the status of large mammals and the drivers of change, and what can this knowledge tell us about how both to plan for their continued persistence or recovery and to deploy them to help cover at least some of the needs of other, less visible components of biological diversity? An analysis of the individual trajectories of 10 large mammal species over the past four centuries of landscape and climate changes in the Northern Appalachian/Acadian ecoregion reveals several patterns of decline and recovery having occurred against a backdrop of variable environmental conditions such as land-use change, climate shifts, prevailing human attitudes, and interspecific relationships. Deploying large mammals as conservation planning tools can range from expanding the scale of conservation ambition to guiding the identification of core conservation lands, connectivity within the overall landscape, and thresholds of development intensity.
URL: http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-90-481-9575-6_9
A Comparison of Noninvasive Techniques to Survey Carnivore Communities in Northeastern North America
Published by Wildlife Society Bulletin
2006 Carnivores are difficult to survey due, in large part, to their relative rarity across the landscape and wariness toward humans. Several noninvasive methods may aid in overcoming these difficulties, but there has been little discussion of the relative merits and biases of these techniques. We assess the value of 5 noninvasive techniques based on results from 2 multiyear studies of carnivores (including members of Carnivora and Didelphidae) in New York forests. Two metrics were particularly valuable in assessing the species-specific value of any particular survey technique: latency to initial detection (LTD) and probability of detection (POD). We found differences in the value of techniques in detecting different species. For midsized species (raccoon [Procyon lotor], fisher [Martes pennanti], opossum [Didelphis virginiana], and domestic cat [Felis catus]), camera traps and track-plates were approximately equivalent in detection efficiency, but the potential for wariness toward the survey apparatus resulted in higher LTD for track-plates than for cameras. On the other hand, track-plates detected small carnivores (marten [M. americana] and weasels [Mustela spp.]) more often than cameras and had higher PODs for small and midsized species than did cameras. Cameras were efficient mechanisms for surveying bears (Ursus americanus; low LTD, high POD) but functioned poorly for discerning presence of coyotes (Canis latrans; high LTD, low POD). Scat surveys and snowtracking were the best methods for coyotes, which avoided camera traps and artificial tracking surfaces. Our analysis of fecal DNA revealed that trail-based fecal surveys were inefficient at detecting species other than coyotes, with the possible exception of red foxes (Vulpes vulpes). Genetic analyses of feces and snowtracking revealed the presence of foxes at sites where other techniques failed to discern these species, suggesting that cameras and track-plates are inefficient for surveying small canids in this region. The LTD of coyotes by camera traps was not correlated with their abundance as indexed by scat counts, but for other species this metric may offer an opportunity to assess relative abundance across sites.
Biography
Dr. Justina Ray has led the Wildlife Conservation Society Canada since its incorporation in 2004. In addition to overseeing the operations of WCS Canada, Ray is involved in research and policy activities associated with conservation planning in northern landscapes, with a particular focus on wolverine and caribou. Although she worked for years in African and Asian tropical forests, North America has been her predominant geographic focus over the past decade. The questions that drive her research are rooted in evaluating the role of shifting landscapes in biodiversity decline and/or change in forested ecosystems. These issues include quantifying the impacts of development activities on biodiversity, including effects of forest changes on mammal population and community structure, and monitoring of species at risk.