Road-valley system crossings: Balancing idealism verses realism in an urban context

Background/Question/Methods

Road network have direct and indirect adverse impacts on ecological systems and processes. This is a critical concern especially when ecological system is sensitive and is under stress from multiple disturbances such as in the valley systems within heavily urbanized areas. These systems, which entail major watercourses and natural cover providing aquatic and terrestrial habitat, are regulated and managed to maintain its ecological functionality. In doing so the conservation scientists and land managers alike often struggle with balancing what is appropriate for conservation and what is realistically attainable. The idealistic notion of conserving narrow ribbons of green within urban cores and in developing peri-urban areas for ecological reasons such as habitat and landscape connectivity are often subject of debate, especially when pragmatic concerns such as cost of conservation is considered. Using a case study of road-valley system crossings in a Greater Toronto Area watershed that is home to Canada’s first urban national park, Rouge Watershed, this study examined challenges associated with conservation planning in an urban landscape and propose a systematic function based decision making framework to integrate idealism and realism driven of multiple stakeholders.

Results/Conclusions

Using a range of stakeholder consultation techniques and ecological modeling approaches to quantify and prioritize existing and potential habitat as well as landscape connectivity value this study demonstrates the utility of the established scientific methods to operationalize science for complex decision making at multiple spatial scales. In addition, this study clearly demonstrates that the major challenge to bridge the divide between the idealistic notion of conservation in areas with limited ecological functionality and pragmatic considerations is much broader than the technical and objective details of the scientific methods. It is mainly associated with subjective value-based parameters, for which there is limited science to provide exact answers. In such cases the framework developed in this study and the associated scientific decision support tools provide a systematic and consistent ways to facilitate decision making.