Assessment, Conservation and Sustainable Use of Forest Biodiversity

Assessment, Conservation and Sustainable Use of Forest Biodiversity
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FOREST ECOSYSTEMS OF CANADA: A COMPONENT OF THE CANADIAN
NATIONAL VEGETATION CLASSIFICATION
Natural Resources Canada
Canadian Forest Service
Great Lakes Forestry Centre, 1219 Queen Street East,
P. O. Box 490 Sault Ste-Marie,
Ontario P6A 5M7 Canada
Keywords: ecosystem classification, forest communities, woodland habitat
Forest Ecosystems of Canada Project
Forest Ecosystems of Canada, a project led by Natural Resources Canada – Canadian Forest Service in
conjunction with numerous federal, provincial, territorial, and non-governmental agencies, seeks to develop
a standardized taxonomic classification of Canadian forest and woodland ecosystems at the level of the
vegetation community. The resulting classification, called the Canadian Forest Ecosystem Classification
(C-FEC), can be thought of as an “encyclopedia” or “dictionary” of Canadian forest communities, containing
standardized definitions and descriptions using common nomenclature and terminology. This classification
will identify known forest and woodland habitats in Canada, describing them with reference to their
constituent species and environmental contexts, and provide an ecological language and database to guide
information exchange and conservation planning at both the community and species levels.
Conservation of specific ecosystems can be considered as a coarse filter approach to protecting the constituent
species and genetic diversity within those ecosystems. Conservation of forest ecosystems requires that a mosaic
pattern of different forest ecosystems (a diversity of patches) be maintained across the landscape with each
patch respecting forest structure (the vertical layering of trees, shrubs and other plants) and function (the
major dynamic life-supporting processes).
The first step towards conservation of forest ecosystems is characterization of the major forest types within the
forested land base. A nationally standardized classification system and accompanying nomenclature for
community-scale ecosystems is a critical tool for biodiversity conservation at the ecosystem, species and
genetic levels, essential for habitat recognition and implementation of protected areas strategies.
There is currently no national classification standard in Canada for identifying, naming, or describing forest
ecosystems at the level of the vegetation community. Existing provincial/territorial forest ecosystem
classifications (FEC’s) were developed independently, so there is a lack of correspondence between them and
the level of overlap between provincial/territorial FEC’s is unknown. Consequently, Canada has no
mechanism for establishing a national inventory of forest communities, for tracking and reporting on their
conservation and health status, or for analyses of the distribution of critical species habitat.
Canadian National Vegetation Classification Project
The Canadian National Vegetation Classification (C-NVC) project is being initiated under the leadership of the
Canadian branch of The Association for Biodiversity Information (ABI-Canada), in collaboration with
numerous governmental and non-governmental partners. It is the Canadian component of the International
Classification of Ecological Communities (ICEC), a hierarchical, taxonomic, vegetation classification that
combines information about vegetation structure, species composition, and habitat characteristics to classify
vegetation communities into associations and their first order aggregates, alliances. The ICEC, developed by
ABI-International together with associated natural heritage programs and conservation data centres (CDC’s),
is an international ecosystem classification standard that is being concurrently implemented in the United
States, Canada, Mexico, and several other Caribbean and Latin American countries.
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