Client: Louis Bull Tribe, Environment and Climate Change Canada

Year: 2022 - Present

Focus Area: Landscape change (Vegetation, land use, and land cover change)

Tools: SyncroSim, ST-Sim

 

Project Overview

Landscape simulation models have been applied to a wide range of questions, including  species conservation, land management, and climate change preparedness. Among available models, state-and-transition simulation models (STSMs) are a class of landscape models that track the states of each simulation cell in the landscape and their transitions over time as a discrete-time stochastic process (Daniel et al. 2016). This makes them well suited to capture model uncertainties and be applied to a wide range of systems, from forests and aquatic communities to urban areas.

Creating and running STSMs can be achieved with ST-Sim, the flagship SyncroSim package for landscape change modeling. ST-Sim support both non-spatial and spatially-explicit models to estimate how much and where changes may occur. Additionally, ST-Sim can be connected with other SyncroSim packages, making it easy to connect landscape change models into other analyses to predict the impact of landscape changes on other ecological processes, such as species distribution, habitat connectivity, carbon dynamics, wildfire risk, and more.

Here, we highlight two recent projects that showcase the power and flexibility of ST-Sim:

Modeling restoration effects on Indigenous traditional medicinal plants: The Louis Bull Tribe (LBT) traditional territory has been subject to a number of anthropogenic disturbances, including agricultural expansion, urban sprawl, oil and gas development, and timber harvest. LBT members are concerned about the combined effects of these stressors on their traditional land use practices, including the foraging of traditional medicinal plants. Together, we forecasted the cumulative impacts of these stressors on nine traditional medicinal plant species’ habitat using a spatially-explicit STSM. We modeled how habitat availability of these medicines was expected to change under a business-as-usual scenario, where current-day rates of disturbances were allowed to persist over time, compared to two different restoration scenarios where existing habitat was protected and minor vs. major restoration effort per year were imposed. We found that habitat availability decreased over time for eight species under the business-as-usual scenario, yet, even a limited amount of restoration effort was estimated to have a positive impact on their habitat availability. Recently, we developed a web-based tool for integration with the Louis Toolkit that allows LBT members to access and query STSM outputs online, supporting capacity building within the community for monitoring their traditional lands.

Modeling habitat of ecologically important bird species: Birds that are tree cavity excavators (i.e., woodpeckers, nuthatches) are important drivers of ecological processes in forests. The climate impacts of fire and drought combined with poor forest management practices have drastically altered tree species composition and threaten the availability of breeding habitat for these species. Previous research (Norris et al. 2022; Norris et al. In prep.) has shown that important predictors of selection of breeding habitat include high percent aspen cover and large diameter at breast height. Using a STSM, we forecasted how the interaction between these stand features and the cumulative impacts of natural and anthropogenic disturbances predicts how habitat availability for seven excavator species will change over time under varying stewardship and fire mitigation scenarios. We found that protecting forest stands with high trembling aspen cover significantly improved habitat outcomes for five species, and setting aside an additional five percent of contiguous habitat further benefited three species. However, recent large fires have already degraded habitat quality, underscoring the urgency of proactive stewardship to maintain and recover suitable habitat.