Creating Public Biodiversity Tools Using Species Distribution Modelling

On November 7th, 2025, the Community of Practice was joined by James Paterson (Table 1). He is a Research Scientist in Biodiversity at the Institute for Wetland and Waterfowl Research, the science arm of Ducks Unlimited Canada.

James highlighted how Canada is losing a large amount of biodiversity, largely due to land and sea use changes. His team developed a tool to predict the amount of biodiversity loss based on land cover. They focused on Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba for the tool. However, they are working on expanding it to include Eastern Canada!

The biodiversity mapping and assessment tool uses over 1.2 million observations of 329 species (Global Biodiversity Information Facility, Alberta Conservation Information Management System, iNaturalist, Saskatchewan Conservation Data Centre, The North American Breeding Bird Survey, Manitoba Conservation Data Centre), a land use time series at 30m resolution (Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada), and a 30 second resolution dataset for climate variables (WorldClim).

A key finding from this research indicated that sites with conservation easements supported more species diversity (39%) compared to sites with no protection. They also noted that conserving 20% of natural habitat in annual prairie cropland conserved 27% of the maximum species diversity. Conserving the same amount of natural habitat in tame grass fields conserved 74% of maximum species diversity. These are just some of the reasons why creating tools such as the one by Ducks Unlimited Canada is valuable; it provides researchers with ways to quantify the impact of land use changes to species over time. With this information, land can be prioritized for habitat conservation and restoration.

Want to try out the tool for yourself? Check it out on the Ducks Unlimited Canada website!

More details can be found in the research article published in October 2024.

Table 1. Key information from presentation, including method of contact.