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| Ontario’s Natural Heritage Areas. |
Since the creation of Queen Victoria Niagara Falls Park in 1887 and Algonquin Provincial Park in 1893, successive governments and private organizations have established a wide array of parks and other natural heritage areas in Ontario. Altogether, more than 40 types of natural heritage areas – some with many sub-categories – now comprise a diverse network of sites that contribute to the conservation of biodiversity in Ontario and beyond. This report provides descriptions of the major categories of natural heritage areas (e.g., National Parks, Migratory Bird Sanctuaries, Provincial Parks, Wildlife Management Areas, Carolinian Canada Sites, and Conservation Easements) with a provisional assessment of their protection status. It is the first time that most types of natural heritage areas established in Ontario have been described in one document.
While the earliest parks were set aside largely for recreational use, passive enjoyment, and appreciation, more recent protection programs have increasingly valued such areas for their significant contributions to biodiversity conservation, ecological sustainability, scientific research, environmental monitoring, education, and understanding. Indeed these values have come to drive science-based approaches used to design and manage both individual areas and clusters of sites. Our better understanding of landscape ecology and large-scale ecological processes has consolidated thinking on the need to design, to plan, and to manage natural heritage areas as functioning networks rather than as isolated islands of green.
Ontario’s Natural Heritage Areas: Their Description and Relationship to the IUCN Protected Areas Classification System contains a reference guide to Ontario’s variety of natural heritage areas and a provisional assessment of their relationship to the IUCN (International Union for the Conservation of Nature) protected areas classification system.
Report by section:
- Overview and introduction (pdf: 5.7MB )
- Part I, section 1 and 2 (pdf: 4.4MB)
- Part II, section 4 and 5 (pdf: 8.9MB)
- Part II, section 6 (pdf: 34.9MB)
- Part II, section 7 and 8 (pdf: 2.3MB)
- Sections 9-11 and appendix (pdf: 315KB)
Complete report (pdf: 128MB)
