Abstract

Landscape connectivity has become an important focus of Canada’s conservation goals. However, ongoing habitat loss and the break-up of habitat patches change a landscape’s composition and configuration, creating additional barriers for wildlife movement and reducing its connectivity. Canadian national parks are at risk of becoming fragmented from direct and indirect stressors, and of becoming islands of natural habitat that are disconnected from their surrounding ecosystems. This study measured the landscape fragmentation of 43 Canadian national parks and paired control areas at key time-steps throughout their history, including before their designation to present-day. It also studied the divergence of fragmentation levels over time between the parks and their control areas. The Effective Mesh Size metric (meff) with both the CUT and CBC procedures was used to measure fragmentation levels, alongside a Progressive-Change Before-After Control-Impact Paired Series study design. The results demonstrate that overall, park protection across the Canadian National Park System has been somewhat successful in preventing landscape fragmentation within their boundaries, in comparison to unprotected control areas. Half of the parks and control areas had a very small change in fragmentation over time. In 35% of parks, fragmentation levels increased faster than in their control areas, and in 15% of parks, fragmentation levels increased more slowly than in their control areas. Older parks with a long history of human influence on the landscape are more fragmented than their control areas, whereas parks that have been designated more recently have a greater effective mesh size than their associated control areas. The regions with the most successful parks in terms of preventing fragmentation are the Taiga and Hudson. The variety of park sizes in these regions indicates that the size of a national park does not necessarily indicate its fragmentation levels. This study provides insights into trends of landscape fragmentation over a long time-period and relates them to different Parks Canada management strategies throughout the agency’s history. The findings will help inform ecological connectivity programming and can indicate the effectiveness of Canada’s efforts to achieve its conservation goals.