O BTAINING I NFORMATION ABOUT A REA D ISTURBED

The task of estimating area disturbed by mowing and/or brushing required a number of inputs.

These included:

• total number of kilometers of roads by province/territory

• total number of kilometers of roads within the breeding ranges of each focal species in each province/territory

• total number of kilometers of roads in each of 4 general land cover types (forest, grassland, shrubland, wetland) within the breeding range of each focal species – for determining how to apply the habitat quality multipliers to nest density values

• total number of hectares mowed and/or brushed in each province/territory

• timing information for the disturbance GIS Analysis

A GIS analysis was needed to obtain the required information about the extent of roads in each province and habitat type, and within each focal species breeding range.

The first step in this process was identifying an efficient, electronic source for the extent of Canada's road network. This source was the National Road Network of Canada (NRNC), available free of charge via the GeoBase web portal. The NRNC is the responsibility of Natural Resources Canada, and contains current, accurate geospatial data about Canada's roads. The NRNC is maintained under a federal-provincial-territorial-municipal agreement, and updates occur at least once per year.

The NRNC GIS layer included some road classes that were unlikely to result in incidental take for various reasons, and these were excluded from the analysis. The excluded road classes were: 1) winter roads; 2) local streets and back alleyways; and 3) rapid transit lanes for buses.

Winter roads were excluded because the winter season is out of scope for our estimate of take.

For the other excluded classes, we felt that their rights-of-way would either be too regularly maintained to be viable habitat for nesting birds (e.g., weekly mowing of rights-of-way by private property owners as in a subdivision), or they would be sidewalks (e.g., urban areas). The road classes that we did include in the analysis are listed in Table 4 - these are the roads that we considered likely to be maintained by government resources.

Table 4. Road classes included in the GIS analysis for kilometers of road in each province/territory.

Code Road Class Description

1 Freeway An unimpeded, high speed controlled access thoroughfare for through traffic with typically no at grade intersections, usually with no property access or direct access and which is accessed by a Ramp.

Pedestrians prohibited.

2 Expressway / Highway A high-speed thoroughfare with a combination of controlled access intersections at any grade.

3 Arterial A major thoroughfare with medium to large traffic capacity.

4 Collector A minor thoroughfare mainly used to access properties and to feed traffic with right of way.

9 Ramp A system of interconnecting roadways providing for the controlled movement between two or more roadways.

10 Resource / Recreation A narrow passage whose primary function is to provide access for resource extraction and may also serve in providing public access to the backcountry.

12 Service Lane A stretch of road permitting vehicles to come to a stop along a Freeway or Highway. Scale, service lane, emergency lane, lookout and rest area.

Habitat types for all of Canada were also available from the GeoBase web portal, in the form of 250 separate land cover shapefiles. This land cover information comes from Landsat 5 and Landsat 7 ortho-images produced by the Canadian Forest Service (CFS) for the forested areas, by Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada (AAFC) for the agricultural areas, and by the Canadian Centre of Remote Sensing (CCRS) for the northern territories. The land cover classification system used is a harmonization of existing systems used by these three agencies, and is summarized at

http://www.geobase.ca/doc/specs/pdf/GeoBase_LCC2000V_Harmonization_Legend.pdf. The harmonized classification contains 43 land cover types, 10 of which are un-vegetated. From these, we created 4 general habitat types – Forest, Shrubland, Grassland and Wetland – that captured 91% of vegetated land cover classes in Canada (Table 5).

Table 5. General habitat types used in the analysis and the land cover classes that comprise them; these 4 Habitat Types represent 91% of the vegetated land covers classes in Canada.

Habitat Types Land Cover Classes Legend Code

Grassland Herb

Moist to dry non-tussock graminoid/shrub tundra Dry graminoid prostrate dwarf shrub

50

Habitat Types Land Cover Classes Legend Code

The final input for the GIS analysis was information about the breeding ranges of each focal species on the list from NatureServe 3.0 (http://www.natureserve.org/getData/birdMaps.jsp).

The total number of kilometers of maintained road (filtered as described above) in each province/territory is shown in Table 6.

Table 6. The extent of roads in Canada, by province and territory.

Province/Territory Total Maintenance¹

1 Maintenance road length reflects the exclusion of urban and suburban roads.

The unfiltered total extent of roads in Canada, based on the NRNC data, is approximately 1.1 M km. This agrees reasonably well with Forman et al. (2003:38), who reported a total of 902,000 km of 2-lane equivalent roadway in Canada for the year 2000. Of these, 574,000 km are unpaved, 312,000 km are paved, and 16,000 km are freeways. The process of filtering out the surburban/urban and rapid transit road classes has reduced total road extent for each province and territory; in some cases, the reduction is quite substantial (e.g. road length in Ontario was reduced from 235,000 to 99,000 km). This may not be an unreasonable result, given the extensive road networks in the many cities and towns of southern Ontario. Additionally, our

small (<33,000 km). However, contacts at the British Columbia Ministry of Transportation, verified this value as reasonable since they maintain about 47,000 km of roads including some suburban/urban.

The number of kilometers of maintenance road (filtered as described above) within each focal species breeding range is shown in Table 7.

Table 7. Number of kilometers of road (filtered) within the breeding range for 6 focal species.

Kilometers of Road within Range

KILL SASP SOSP CCSP VESP MALL

BC 16,996 17,361 17,667 6,760 10,519 17,667

Yukon 756 2,436 702 0 0 2,436

NW Territories 307 337 264 253 0 339 Alberta 183,870 183,870 183,870 183,870 183,804 183,870 Saskatchewan 210,538 210,538 210,538 210,508 209,059 210,538 Manitoba 47,392 47,392 47,392 47,081 45,847 47,359 Ontario 66,759 66,769 66,759 53,240 63,503 66,759 Quebec 63,500 74,158 63,333 13,610 50,024 70,320 New Brunswick 16,693 16,724 16,724 0 10,463 16,611 Nova Scotia 8,079 15,411 15,411 0 8,957 12,567

PEI 2,764 2,764 2,764 0 2,764 0

Newfoundland/Labrador 0 9,714 1,401 0 0 0

Nunavut 0 31 0 0 0 0

Researching Area Disturbed

Information about area disturbed was collected from provincial and territorial transportation ministries (contacts are provided in Appendix A); these agencies managed most of the road kilometers in the country. Some jurisdictions did not provide data, so it was necessary to generate estimates for them based on information obtained from the responding jurisdictions.

For each province/territory that provided disturbance data, we calculated the proportion of total roadside hectares that were mowed or brushed. We then averaged the proportion maintained for the responding provinces/territories, and applied this proportion to the total roadside

hectares for all non-respondent jurisdictions to derive an estimate of area maintained for them.

In terms of the timing of maintenance operations for non-respondent jurisdictions, we assumed an even distribution of effort between June and August inclusive, unless information obtained from interviews with transportation contacts indicated otherwise.

The road maintenance inputs used in the simulation model are shown in Appendix C. These values can easily be updated in the model if/when better quality data become available.