Abstract
Provincial parks of British Columbia are protected for their high ecological, cultural, and recreational values. With climate change exacerbating, more frequent and severe disturbances are anticipated to cause land cover alteration in park ecosystems, leading to loss of habitat and ecosystem services. It’s crucial to understand how landscape configurations changed in the past to make informed and proactive conservation efforts. Using the landscapemetrics package in R, this project quantitatively analyzed the landscape configuration of forests and shrubs on 1 km by 1 km grids in a time step of decades from 1989 to 2019 for E.C. Manning Park, Mount Robson Park, Tweedsmuir Park, and West Arm Park. The metrics were tested to compare and characterize grids along the park boundary versus the interior. The metrics highlighted the spatial distribution and shape complexity of forests and shrubs, as well as the time frames during which noticeable land cover changes occurred. The results provided spatial, temporal, and statistical insights into the landscape dynamic over the decades and showed that future park management could benefit from accounting for the spatial variation of the landscape configuration within parks by developing area-specific ecosystem restoration strategies.
MGEM Student: Wendi Zhang
Community Partner: Sharilynn Wardrop (BC Parks Terrestrial Ecologist), Stephen Ban (BC Parks Protected Areas Applied Ecologist)
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Cite this project
Zhang, Wendi, 2023, “Decadal Grid Analysis of Landscape Metrics for Provincial Parks of British Columbia”, https://doi.org/10.5683/SP3/XEY9WU, Borealis, V1