Why Did We Put That Park There?

Banff National Park Rundle Range (Photo credit: Town of Banff) 

    You may think that putting a protected area on the land, no matter what its spatial extents or location, would be a good thing.  In most cases, more protected areas are a good thing and bigger is usually better.  This is true in most cases but not necessarily in all cases.  Canada has some of the few remaining wild places left in the world.  If Canada wants to be an ambassador to the rest of the world for biodiversity, conservation is of utmost importance in order to plan the development of our national parks while ecological integrity in mind.  Parks Canada’s mandate is to protect a representative area of all the unique ecoregions in Canada, but it hasn’t always been this way.

    The world’s first national park was founded in 1972 in Yellowstone National Park in the United States of America. Canada soon followed suit with the establishment of Banff National Park in 1885.  The establishment of the first national parks was not to protect biodiversity, but to generate tourism, recreational activities and revenue for the federal and local governments (Deguise & Kerr, 2006). Since they were not originally planned with biodiversity in mind, many of Canada’s national parks are located in areas with little ecological importance. It was not until recently, in 2002 when the Species at Risk Act (SARA) was created that the National Parks changed its mandate to protecting ecological integrity (Deguise & Kerr, 2006).

    Sadly, Canada’s placement of national parks is no better at protecting endangered flora and fauna than if they had been placed at random (Deguise & Kerr, 2006). In fact, in many ecozones, randomly generated protected areas would have better ecological protection than the current parks system. The areas which suffer the most are the Mixed Wood Plains ecozone, located in the heavily developed region of southern Ontario, and the Prairies.  These two locations have the least amount of protected area and the highest concentration of endangered species.  I believe that this is because in Southern Ontario, land is at a premium and there would be pressure from developers to prevent protected areas from being created.  In the prairies, almost the entire ecozone has been converted to agricultural land and therefore very few intact natural areas remain.   

    Bigger is better.  If we compare the number of endangered species in a ecozone to the average size of the protected area in these areas, the ecozones with the larger protected areas have fewer endangered species (see figure below).  Large animals need large protected areas to maintain healthy populations.  Most of Canada’s national parks are too small to properly maintain endangered species populations of large animals.  Even smaller animals such as reptiles and amphibians need large areas since natural hazards can cause serious population drops. 

Figure 1. The relationship between mean reserve size and numbers of endangered species per ecozone

   Lets hope that the next national park Canada decides to create is put somewhere that protects the natural habitat better than a randomly placed park and lets hope it's a big one that does more than protect ice and rock.

Works Cited

Deguise, I. E., & Kerr, J. T. (2006). Protected Areas and Prospects for Endangered Species Conservation in Canada. Conservation Biology , 48-55.