Overview of the Conservation Implementation Plan for the Kespukwitk, Southwest Nova Scotia Priority Place

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Land acknowledgement

We acknowledge the ancestral, unceded, and treaty lands of the Indigenous Peoples that call these lands home. The Kespukwitk / Southwest Nova Scotia Priority Place is located within Mi’kma’ki, the ancestral territory of the Mi’kmaq which is covered by the historic Treaties of Peace and Friendship. We pay our respects to the Indigenous Mi’kmaq peoples who have occupied this land for over 12,000 years, past, present and future. Through this acknowledgement, it is our intent to show respect for the people who have stewarded these lands and waters since time immemorial and those who continue to care for them. We do this to reaffirm our commitment to learn and work together in the spirit of reconciliation.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank all members of the Kespukwitk Conservation Collaborative and funders for their contributions to this initiative. Because of your efforts, a great deal of work has been accomplished in this Priority Place, resulting in conservation actions that benefit species at risk and other biodiversity, such as migratory birds and species of importance to Indigenous peoples.

Wasoqopa’q (Acadia) First Nation

Atlantic Canada Conservation Data Centre

Birds Canada

Clean Annapolis River Project

Coastal Action

Confederacy of Mainland Mi’kmaq

Dalhousie University

Environment and Climate Change Canada – Canada Wildlife Service

Medway Community Forest Cooperative

Mersey Tobeatic Research Institute

Nature Conservancy of Canada

Nova Scotia Department of Natural Resources and Renewables

Nova Scotia Nature Trust

Nova Scotia Bird Society

Parks Canada – Kejimkujik National Park and National Historic Site

Southwest Nova Biosphere Reserve Association

In addition to the core team members, many partners, community members, landowners, and subject area experts have delivered or participated in project activities to advance the goals of the Priority Place.

Thank you all for your participation!

Introduction

Pan-Canadian approach to transforming species at risk conservation in Canada

Canada’s biodiversity is a cornerstone of our way of life. As human impact on the planet grows, more habitat is lost and more species are at risk of extinction. We need to take innovative action to protect and recover the animals, plants, and places we love. The Pan-Canadian Approach to Transforming Species at Risk Conservation in Canada (Pan-Canadian Approach) shifts from single-species approaches to conservation to approaches that focus on multiple species and ecosystems. Focusing our effort in specific locations with high biodiversity and concentrations of species at risk helps conserve habitat that benefits many species at the same time. It also brings together partners with common goals to improve collaboration and promote shared leadership. Through partnership, we are working to achieve sustainable protection and recovery of species at risk.

Important principles guide collaborative work under the Pan-Canadian Approach:

• shared priorities and leadership
• Indigenous engagement
• strengthened evidence-base for decision making
• aligned investments

We identify priorities using defined criteria, followed by:

• cooperative action planning
• investment and implementation of actions
• monitoring and reporting of results

The results and benefits of action under the Pan-Canadian Approach are:

• better conservation outcomes for more species at risk
• improved return on investment
• increased co-benefits for biodiversity and ecosystems

Priority places for species at risk

Under this approach, 12 Priority Places have been selected across Canada. These places have significant biodiversity, high concentrations of species at risk, and opportunities to advance conservation efforts. In each Priority Place, the federal and provincial or territorial governments are working with Indigenous peoples, organizations and other partners to develop conservation implementation plans.

The Priority Places are at different stages of cooperative planning and implementation of conservation actions under the Pan-Canadian Approach. In many of these areas, important conservation work has been ongoing for a long time and in some of these places collaborative approaches and conservation planning were already underway before they were chosen as Priority Places. Other Priority Places are new initiatives and are in earlier stages of engagement and collaborative conservation planning. All of these Priority Places build on existing work by implementing coordinated, multi-partner conservation actions in these places, but there is no one size fits all approach to collaborative planning across these diverse places. To learn more about the Priority Places initiative and the work undertaken by our partners to recover species at risk within these Priority Places, please visit our interactive website.

Conservation implementation planning in the Kespukwitk / Southwest Nova Scotia Priority Place

Kespukwitk / Southwest Nova Scotia has long been recognized for its high biodiversity values, including concentrations of species at risk. Partners in Kespukwitk have been working collaboratively towards conservation goals for many years and were already making strides towards more strategic and coordinated ecosystem-based approaches. Given the high biodiversity values, and given the strong partnerships, Kespukwitk / Southwest Nova was well position to be designated as one of the 12 Priority Places for Species at Risk across Canada.

The Kespukwitk / Southwest Nova Scotia Priority Place initiative is guided by the Kespukwitk Conservation Collaborative, a collaborative partnership of Mi’kmaq First Nations, Indigenous organizations, non-government organizations, academic institutions, and federal and provincial government departments. The collaborative was established in October 2017, though many of the partners involved have been working together to conserve species at risk and biodiversity in the Priority Place for many years. The collaborative takes part in creating the vision, planning, implementing, and assessing the initiative, and work with many partners, knowledge holders, and interested people to develop and carry out actions in this Priority Place.

The core team is committed to advancing a Two-Eyed Seeing approach, acknowledging the benefits of both Mi’kmaw and mainstream science perspectives. They are using the Conservation Standards as a framework for collaborative action planning. This internationally recognized tool provides a clear, systematic approach to designing, managing, implementing, monitoring, and adapting conservation efforts. For more information, please see: Conservation Standards.

This document presents an overview of the Kespukwitk / Southwest Nova Scotia Priority Place and a summary of the planning that guides the implementation of conservation work in the Priority Place. It represents a snapshot in time and will be updated as work in the Priority Place continues to evolve. You can find more information on the Priority Place here: Kespukwitk / Southwest Nova Scotia Priority Place Website.

This document represents the merging of existing planning documents in order to take a broader ecosystem approach. It does not replace action plans or management plans under the Species at Risk Act.

Conservation actions in the Priority Places are funded by multiple federal, provincial, and municipal government and non-government partners and stakeholders, including contributions under the Canada Nature Fund. All strategies that may benefit species at risk conservation in the Kespukwitk / Southwest Nova Scotia Priority Place are incorporated into the collaborative planning process. However, the implementation of strategies is subject to appropriations, priorities, and budgetary constraints of the participating jurisdictions and organizations.

Kespukwitk / Southwest Nova Scotia Priority Place

Size: 1.60 million hectares

Description: Covers 29% of the province of Nova Scotia, including the province’s largest remaining intact forests

Ecosystem Composition:

• 71% Acadian forest
• 8% wetlands
• 2,813 km of coastline
• > 900 coastal islands

Kespukwitk / Southwest Nova Scotia is one of the most diverse areas of the province of Nova Scotia. There are many different habitats in this Priority Place, including rugged coast, protected bays, coastal islands, lakes, rivers, wetlands, fertile valleys, and Nova Scotia’s largest remaining intact forests. These large areas of forest are important for the conservation of a wide range of plant and animal species.

Kespukwitk / Southwest Nova Scotia is in the traditional territory of the Mi’kmaq, subject to the historic Peace and Friendship Treaties (1725-1779). Kespukwitk is the Mi'kmaq district that closely aligns with the Kespukwitk / Southwest Nova Scotia Priority Place. There are 2 Mi'kmaq First Nations in Kespukwitk: Wasoqopa'q (Acadia) First Nation and Bear River First Nation.

Kespukwitk / Southwest Nova Scotia supports a high concentration of species at risk within Atlantic Canada. There are 72 species at risk representing 94% of the terrestrial species at risk found in Nova Scotia. There are also 97 priority bird species from the Bird Conservation Region Strategies in this Priority Place.

Kejimkujik National Park and National Historic Site is found in Kespukwitk / Southwest Nova Scotia, as well as a network of Provincial Parks, Wilderness Areas, and Nature Reserves. In the coastal zone there are four Migratory Bird Sanctuaries and a National Wildlife Area, as well as eight Important Bird Areas, some of which are of global significance as breeding, staging, and over-wintering areas for many shorebirds, marsh birds, and waterfowl.

Vision statement

The core team developed the following vision statement to aspire to a desired state or ultimate condition that the Kespukwitk / Southwest Nova Scotia Priority Place is working to achieve:

A healthy, resilient, and diverse landscape in Kespukwitk where interconnected ecosystems, habitats, species, and engaged communities thrive.

Conservation Targets

Conservation Targets are the biodiversity features (species, habitats, or ecological systems) that a project team is trying to conserve and restore. They are selected to represent all of the biodiversity in the project’s scope. Work in this Priority Place focuses on 12 ecosystem conservation targets:

Nested Targets are features or components of the conservation targets that are particularly important to the project. They co-occur on the landscape, require similar ecological processes, and have similar threats as the target. Therefore, they require similar conservation strategies.

The following are nested targets for the Priority Place:

• Federal Species at Risk Act (SARA) listed species (Appendix A)
• committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada (COSEWIC) assessed species at risk (Appendix A)
• Nova Scotia Endangered Species Act listed species at risk
• species covered under the Migratory Birds Convention Act (MBCA)
• important cultural species
• other rare, unique, or threatened biodiversity features (for example, Old Growth Forest)

In order to understand the important connections between the conservation targets and human well-being in Kespukwitk / Southwest Nova Scotia, ecosystem services and human well-being benefits were identified (Figure 2).

Pressures

Conservation must take place in the face of a wide variety of pressures, sometimes referred to as threats. A common challenge for conservation practitioners is deciding which pressures to address. These decisions are often made by applying a set of objective criteria to assess or rank pressures so that actions can be directed where they are most needed. Direct pressures or threats to the Conservation Targets in the Kespukwitk / Southwest Nova Scotia Priority Place were identified and assessed based on their scope (or extent), the severity of their impact, and the degree to which their impacts are reversible (Open Standards for the Practice of Conservation, 2020). This assessment rated pressures or threats at an ecosystem level within the scope of the Priority Place, and so the outcome may differ from that of species-specific threat assessments found in other documents (for example, COSEWIC status reports or SARA Recovery Strategies).

An internationally recognized standard for pressures is used to the extent possible (International Union for Conservation of Nature – Conservation Measures Partnership; IUCN-CMP), though some pressure names have been adjusted to make them more applicable to the pressures present in Kespukwitk / Southwest Nova Scotia (Table 1). The pressure rating for each of the Conservation Targets are then combined into an overall rating of each pressure across all targets (Table 1).

Climate-smart conservation

Climate change is another significant pressure to biodiversity and species at risk in the Kespukwitk / Southwest Nova Scotia Priority Place. The current and projected impacts of climate change add several stressors to conservation targets including shifting and changing seasons, severe weather events, shifting species and ecosystems, and potentially exacerbating other pressures and creating new ones. Instead of treating climate change as a direct pressure, the Kespukwitk / Southwest Nova Scotia Priority Place is working towards incorporating climate change into all stages of conservation planning and adaptive management. Many conservation organizations are starting to adopt this “climate-smart conservation” approach. This includes using climate scenario planning to consider the potential impacts of climate change on ecosystems and species, anticipating and managing for change, being adaptable to adjusting strategies and goals, and integrating climate adaptation into conservation actions.

Situation analysis

A situation analysis helps to create a common understanding of the project’s context, describing the relationships between the biological environment and the social, economic, political, and institutional systems. By understanding this context, the team is better informed to select strategies that will achieve their goals and objectives. The following diagram is a tool to help visualize the high-level situation analysis for the Priority Place, identifying some of the contributing factors that drive the pressures and affect the conservation targets (Figure 3). It will be updated and revised by the core team on an ongoing basis.

Key strategies

In order to make progress towards the conservation of the targets and nested targets, high-level strategies have been identified and prioritized for the Kespukwitk / Southwest Nova Scotia Priority Place (Table 2). Each of these strategies may have several activities that address one or more pressures and / or targets, and many of the strategies will advance implementation of Species at Risk recovery approaches. Not all of these strategies will be implemented as projects under the Priority Place and some strategies may be underway or led by other initiatives. The International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and the Conservation Measures Partnership (CMP) have produced a set of standard classifications of conservation actions. The ability to meaningfully summarize information and learn across projects is facilitated by using these common terms to describe conservation challenges and solutions.

Evaluating progress towards outcomes

Measuring the effectiveness of conservation action is central to good adaptive management. The CIP will apply two types of monitoring:

1. Status monitoring of Conservation Targets (status of habitats and species assessed using key ecological attributes, indicators and data sources identified in the Viability Assessment), and
2. Effectiveness monitoring (whether actions are having their intended impacts), guided by theories of change.

Appendix 1. Nested species at risk targets of the Kespukwitk / Southwest Nova Scotia Priority Place

This list includes all species at risk found in the Priority Place, however, not all species listed will directly benefit from actions being undertaken through the implementation of this plan. Up-to-date as of the time of publication.