Developing species-at-risk models for assessing forest degradation

Forest Degradation for Species-at-Risk. It will do this for several Species-At-Risk. The objectives are to: 1) develop interoperable national and regional habitat models for woodland caribou that can be used to forecast and create benchmarks for habitat changes across relevant Canadian jurisdictions and 2) to develop generic wildlife habitat forecasting models that can be operationalized in any Canadian forested ecosystems, using boreal bird Species-at-Risk as a test case. 3) Identify existing predator and competitor (of caribou) habitat models (e.g., wolf, grizzly, deer, moose) that could be used to forecast the habitats of these species for jurisdictions across Canada. The entire effort must follow the new PERFICT standard as outlined in McIntire et al (2022) and be compatible with SpaDES. These interoperable models must allow us to assess the current and future “degradation state” of the Species-at-Risk.