When the tide goes out in the Bay of Fundy, an array of impressive mud flats are revealed. These mudflats are the basis of an important ecosystem, and are very important for the annual sandpiper migration. We have created a storymap, with photography from Nick Hawkins, exploring this fascinating natural feature. To learn more about the flats and why they need to be protected, please click the link below.
As the effects of climate change increase, most species will experience shifts in their natural home ranges in the north and at higher elevations. The following factors play a key role in how well plants and animals can adapt to changes in their environment.
Time: Many species can adapt quickly by migrating to more suitable habitat or altering their patterns. Other species, especially plants, require longer periods to adapt. If the pace of change is too quick, extinction becomes a risk.
Genetic variability: Larger populations of a given species are more likely to survive through simple evolution, while endangered species have lower genetic variability.
Availability of alternate habitat: To adapt and survive, many species have to move to more suitable habitat, if available. In an increasingly developed landscape, finding new habitat may be very difficult.
Food sources: A change in temperature affects when animals produce their young, hibernate and migrate, and when plants bloom and fruit. As species adapt at different rates, the likelihood exists that some animals may not be able to find suitable food sources at the right time, causing more stress to the species.
The international Two Countries, One Forest network recognizes the Restigouche as one of 5 critical ecological linkages in the northern New England / southern Quebec / Maritimes region. Yet, government has protected from development less than 3 percent of the watershed in New Brunswick, leaving most areas open for mining, logging or new development proposals. Forest management plans show that most of the wildest areas of forest on Crown land will be logged within 5 to 10 years. This will remove habitat around salmon streams and for wildlife that need old forests.Moose, black bears, American marten, fisher, bald eagles, barred owls, scarlet tanagers and numerous interior forest birds thrive amidst forest-covered hills, deep gorges and some of the most pristine rivers and streams in Eastern Canada.
Atlantic salmon – The Restigouche River and its tributaries support one of the most productive wild Atlantic salmon populations, with some of the largest salmon, in eastern Canada.
Canada lynx – Restigouche natural areas are home to critical populations of Canada lynx. The area provides a natural corridor for lynx to disperse for feeding and breeding between the Gaspé and northern Maine.
The provincial government created new Protected Natural Areas in 2014. This brought New Brunswick’s proportion of protected land up to 4.7 percent of the province. The national average is 10 percent.
At the same time, government removed conservation from more than one-quarter of our public land they used to manage to conserve fish, wildlife habitat and our rivers. The forestry industry has access to these previously conserved habitats for increased logging and clear-cutting. Researchers are very concerned that it will be difficult to conserve viable populations of all our wildlife under this plan.
The strategy puts at risk our cold-water rivers and their wild Atlantic salmon populations. Old forests in the headwaters of the Restigouche and Miramichi Rivers used to provide shady habitat, but now are open for increased clear-cutting.
At the same time, government will allow industry to double the amount of tree plantations, to occupy one-quarter of Crown forests. Tree plantations are NOT the same as old growth mixed forests, and take away habitat vital for the survival of native wildlife such as barred owls, flying squirrels and American marten.
For our forests to be resilient to climate change, we need to conserve diversity and natural forests. The current strategy is reducing natural diversity in forests and along waterways. This increases the risk new or increased pests and diseases, droughts, floods and fires will degrade our forests.
[The following commentary appeared in The Daily Gleaner on April 5, 2017.]
For the first time since 1992, Canadian governments are working together to expand our network of protected areas to conserve nature. The federal government and all provinces and territories recently agreed to work on a plan to meet international targets for protected areas.
In 2010, Canada committed to protecting at least 17 per cent of land and 10 per cent of our ocean by 2020, under the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity.
New Brunswick needs to contribute to this plan and report on actions. Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society – NB Chapter (CPAWS NB) is eager to support our government to put nature conservation at the forefront of our nation building.
CPAWS NB has a three-point plan for how the provincial government can do this. First, New Brunswick should commit to a new action plan to have at least 10 per cent of the province in legally protected natural areas and nature-oriented parks.
This would bring us up to the national average, and be more comparable to the action plans of all the other provinces.
We need a road map showing how New Brunswick will contribute to the nation-wide targets. We should focus not only on quantity, but also on the quality of protection. Our province’s researchers already have the information to identify the right areas for protection of nature, and the right ways to protect them.
Second, the New Brunswick government should work with the federal government to create protected areas around key coastal habitats. This could include some mud flat habitats that are vital stopovers for hungry migrating shorebirds. It could include ocean waters that surround protected island nature reserves, or inter-tidal zones next to coastal parks, like Fundy National Park.
Third, the province could step up the protection of remaining old forest habitats on Crown land.
They could give protected natural area status to ecologically rich wetlands, lakes and river headwaters. Most of the old forest habitats on Crown land remain open to all kinds of industrial development. This puts at risk these forests’ ability to be resilient to climate change impacts, and to continue providing us with flood protection or habitat for pollinators.
We have an opportunity to protect a special ecotourism gem in the Restigouche region. It’s already known for its salmon angling and canoeing. However, industrial development is eating away at these wild forests and rivers year by year. We could create a world-class wilderness tourism destination – the Restigouche Wilderness Waterway – a wide protected corridor along the river, on Crown land. It would help protect the million-dollar salmon angling economy. If we conserve this area’s special nature, promising ecotourism businesses could reliably promote a quality wilderness destination around the world.
CPAWS NB, our volunteers, partners and supporters stand ready to help our province achieve this goal. On Canada’s 150th anniversary of Confederation, there could be no better gift than well-protected nature – the iconic symbol of our cultures. As the climate changes, protecting natural areas is even more important, because the habitat we save might be our own.
ROBERTA CLOWATER is executive director of the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society – New Brunswick Chapter, in Fredericton.
The oceans around New Brunswick influence our culture, contribute to our economic well-being and continue to shape our natural environment. The world recognizes the Bay of Fundy for its natural riches. From the world’s highest tides, to concentrations of endangered whales and coastal stopovers for migratory sandpipers, it has been in the running alongside the world’s natural wonders. The Gulf of St. Lawrence supports some of the richest fish and shellfish spawning and feeding grounds in Canada. Together, our ocean waters support over 7,000 tourism and recreation jobs, and over 11,000 jobs in fishing and seafood processing in New Brunswick.
These important values depend upon a resilient and robust ocean system. However, industrial uses in our oceans are expanding. We are faced with proposals for more crude oil tanker traffic, large open-net salmon aquaculture sites, oil and gas exploration, tidal turbines, and a proposed underwater cable across the Bay of Fundy to transport power from New Brunswick to Massachusetts. We are already feeling the effects of climate change, including changes to locations or amounts of whales, seabirds, fish, and the tiniest zooplankton at the bottom of the food chain. Too often, the health of our oceans is out of sight (under the water), and out of mind. We haven’t established the ocean protection measures to minimize those risks.
We need to balance these risks with the insurance policy that comes from establishing marine protected areas (also called MPAs). These are places in the ocean that government legally designates for conservation purposes. Places where we minimize human impacts in the ocean to ensure we can maintain the natural environment well into the future. MPAs provide long-term protection for the sea floor and the water column all the way to the surface, along with the wildlife that live in or swim through that area. Usually, MPAs would not permit industrial activities and construction that damage the sea bottom, and would restrict some kinds of fishing.
Governments and ocean stakeholders around the world recognize MPAs as an effective tool for helping to sustain ocean health and local economies. Studies show that fish populations in MPAs thrive, and can spillover to enhance fisheries outside MPAs. Marine protected areas can help safeguard the natural areas that local tourism businesses need, and that international tourists want to experience.
Many sites in the oceans around New Brunswick are sensitive or highly valuable natural spaces. Whales and basking sharks come to feed and congregate in the deep waters of the outer Bay of Fundy. Concentrations of mussel reefs, corals, kelp forests and sponge clusters act like“ecosystem engineers” and provide refuge for all kinds of fish, sea squirts, jellyfish and anemones. In the inner Bay of Fundy, vast mudflats create the right habitat that allows 80 per cent of the world’s semipalmated sandpipers to feed on mud shrimp and rest during their fall migration. All of these functions, and more, need to be included in networks of MPAs along both coasts.
As part of global efforts to help conserve our oceans, the federal government has committed to significantly increasing Canada’s marine protected areas. We are committed to protecting 10 per cent of Canada’s oceans by 2020, and we are now at less than one per cent. The ocean waters around New Brunswick only have less than half of one per cent in marine protected areas. The Department of Fisheries, Oceans and the Coast Guard and the Department of Environment and Climate Change are identifying potential candidates for the Bay of Fundy and the Gulf of St. Lawrence.
The federal and provincial governments will need to work together to ensure that the oceans around New Brunswick receive the conservation action we need. For the most effective solution, we will all have to co-operate – business owners, the fishing community, conservation groups, and citizens. The Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society – New Brunswick Chapter is eager to work with all stakeholders and the public to make sure MPAs are established in an open way, and using strong objectives for ocean habitat protection. Plans are in the early stages.
If we do this right, marine protected areas will forever protect special places in our sea, restore and sustain healthy oceans and maintain vital ocean-based economies.
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The above article was published in The Daily Gleaner on Feb. 4, 2017.
– A new report from the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society (CPAWS) finds that the federal government has made little progress in the past 18 months in protecting important areas of the Bay of Fundy, despite years of study documenting the need for stronger conservation measures to nurture critical sea life including the North Atlantic right whale, cold-water corals and haddock.
CPAWS issued a challenge to governments in June 2011 to protect 12 special marine areas, including parts of the Bay of Fundy, by December 2012 as an important step towards creating long-needed networks of marine protected areas.
“In New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, we’ve seen no progress in establishing a Bay of Fundy National Marine Conservation Area. Despite its international status as a marine treasure, the very ecosystems that make it so valuable are not being protected from the combined impacts of dragging, aquaculture, shipping, tidal turbines, and potential LNG terminals and marine sediment mining,” says Roberta Clowater, Executive Director of CPAWS New Brunswick.
“Across Canada, we’ve seen marked progress by governments in protecting four of the 12 sites, limited progress on four more, and no progress at all on the remaining four, so it’s not all bad news. However, other countries – most notably Australia — have pulled far ahead of us in protecting their oceans, leaving us with a mounting challenge to catch up,” says Sabine Jessen, CPAWS National Oceans Program Manager.
Twenty years ago, Canada made an international commitment to establishing a network of marine protected areas by 2012 in response to the growing threats to ocean life of overfishing, industrial development, pollution and climate change.
“Canada has made some progress on developing a marine protected area network policy since 2011, but the failure to advance quickly on the 12 sites, or to move more speedily on getting protected area networks in place is serious cause for concern,” adds Jessen.
“The 12 sites we identified 18 months ago have long been studied, and the time was ripe to move ahead with protection measures, so it is frustrating that the pace of action has been so slow. And with cutbacks now to budgets at Fisheries and Oceans Canada, Environment Canada and Parks Canada, we are seriously concerned about the government’s capacity to move ahead in creating and managing effective marine protected areas,” adds Jessen.
“It is like cutting off our noses to spite our faces. Marine protected areas are key to ensuring healthy stocks of fish and other forms of marine life for the future. There is absolutely no long term financial gain in failing to invest in marine protection,” adds Jessen.
The 12 marine areas that CPAWS recommended for protection by December 2012, listed below, are spread across the country:
• In the Pacific, the Hecate Strait Glass Sponge Reefs, Scott Islands, Southern Strait of Georgia, and Big Eddy are areas providing important habitat for sea life including Tufted Puffins, endangered Orca whales and rockfish.
• In the Atlantic, CPAWS recommended protecting the waters off the South Coast Fjords of Newfoundland, in the Laurentian Channel, St. Anns Bank off Nova Scotia, and parts of the Bay of Fundy, American Bank (La Gaspesie) and les Iles de la Madeleine in the Gulf of St Lawrence. These marine areas are home to a range of endangered sea life including Leatherback turtles, Right, Blue and Beluga whales, and nurseries for fish including herring, mackerel, flounder and Atlantic cod.
• In the North, CPAWS called for protection of the Arctic Ocean’s Lancaster Sound — critical habitat for Narwhal and Bowhead whales, as well as a biologically rich area in James Bay off Quebec, called Tawich.
In its report, CPAWS credits governments for significant progress towards protection of St Anns Bank off NS, Hecate Strait Glass Sponge Reefs, the Southern Strait of Georgia and the Scott Islands waters off BC, but laments the total lack of progress towards protecting BC’S Big Eddy, James Bay’s Tawich marine area, the Bay of Fundy, and the waters off the South Coast Fjords of Newfoundland.
CPAWS also raises concern that none of the 12 sites has received final legal protection, and the proposed conservation measures for the nine that have made some progress need strengthening to guarantee their long-term health.
CPAWS is recommending that Canada invest $35 million per year to create a network of Canadian marine protected areas.
“ Based on studies in other countries, the financial gain from protecting places within our oceans that nurture sea life and create better conditions for sustainable fishing and other local industries such as eco-tourism, are significant. We simply can’t afford to continue being world laggards in marine conservation – for our own sake and that of our children and theirs to come,” adds Jessen.
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View full report, “How deep did Canada dare? Assessing national progress towards marine protection by the end of 2012”, January 2012
View CPAWS’ Dare to be Deep campaign for more background information.
Contact: Roberta Clowater, rclowater@cpaws.org, 506-452-9902.
National Parks bring a wealth of values to New Brunswickers – habitat and wildlife conservation, protection of water quality, outdoor recreation, and the jobs and other economic benefits associated with research, park operations and tourism. For over thirty years, ecologists and park users have been trying to figure out how to expand the conservation value of Fundy National Park. The Park’s boundaries are not large enough to allow park managers to conserve populations of wide-ranging mammals, watersheds and other wildlife (such as the now endangered population of Inner Bay of Fundy Atlantic salmon). The “State of the Parks Report” (1997) notes that Fundy National Park has experienced the second highest number of wildlife extirpations (the loss of a species from a region) of all national parks, behind only tiny Point Pelee in southern Ontario. With the predicted impacts of climate change on ecosystems, we need to conserve the ability of Fundy natural areas to respond and bounce back from additional stresses in temperature, drought, floods and storms.
Some examples include:
In New Brunswick, we need:
A world-class destination for ecotourism, outdoor adventures, and angling, with plenty of economic tourism potential yet untapped.