By Poliana Mendes, Post-doctoral Researcher at l’Université Laval

“A change is gonna come”. With this inspiring proclamation, the 2022 Annual Meeting of the Ecological Society of America (ESA) unfolded in Montreal, marking the first face-to-face ESA gathering in the post-COVID era. This conference presented not just a refreshing reunion, but a heartfelt reminder to us, the attendees, about our significant role in shaping a promising future. We were called upon to extend our ecological understanding while actively uprooting detrimental traditions. 

At the 2022 ESA meeting, the ResNet, a Canadian research network with the objective of identifying paths for sustainable and resilient landscape management, curated a session titled “Harnessing Social-Ecological Research for Sustainable Landscapes – the ResNet Project.” This session featured numerous presentations by various ResNet researchers. 

Thanks to the QCBS Excellence Award, I had the opportunity to participate in the 2022 ESA and showcase my research on planning for ecosystem rehabilitation to enhance public access to ecosystem services. My presentation titled “Reducing shortages in ecosystem services provision with land management planning in the agglomeration of Quebec City” was part of the oral session organized by ResNet.

My research focuses on an innovative approach in spatial prioritization to address ecosystem services deficits, such as the need for green spaces in heat wave-prone areas. Spatial prioritization is a vital tool for planning conservation strategies, helping to identify areas that, if protected, maximize the benefits nature provides to people while keeping acquisition costs low. 

Spatial prioritization often overlooks ecosystem services deficits to its focus on current ecosystem benefits. To remedy this, recent conservation science has begun incorporating demand data for ecosystem services into conservation planning. We took this approach further, introducing an additional step to consider management scenarios in areas with known or anticipated benefit-gaps. We identified opportunities for management in unused areas or where management is feasible, such as degraded wetlands, abandoned farms, or vacant lots. In our study region, the Greater Quebec City Area, vacant lots were selected as the focus of these opportunities.

Our goal was to create a cost-effective management strategy that maximizes the benefits of nature to people and reduces existing benefit-gaps. We created four management scenarios for each vacant lot: transformation into an urban forest, meadow, urban park, or lawn. The expected capacity of these lots to provide ecosystem services after management was based on data from similar existing green spaces. Management costs were based on local reports and literature. For conservation planning, we used systematic conservation planning via Marxan software). 

Preliminary results show that including vacant lot management reduces costs, creates more compact networks of priority areas, and reduces shortfalls in target achievement. This suggests that strategic management of vacant lots can be cheaper and benefit more people compared to a no-management scenario. 

The 2022 ESA Meeting provided me with an invaluable opportunity to learn from and engage with leading minds in the field, enhancing my research perspective and inspiring me to deepen my understanding of spatial prioritization in the ever-evolving field of ecology.

About the author: Poliana Mendes is a post-doctoral researcher at the Université Laval.

_{* AI was used to improve clarity of this text.}