Abstract
Ontario is a spatially heterogenous province. Natural resource policies and management plans must therefore address and account for this heterogeneity.
An eco-regionalization scheme must possess certain minimum criteria to be effective. These criteria are: 1) an explicit explanation of spatial and temporal scales and variation; 2) a hierarchical construct of eco-regional domains; 3) an explicit quantitative description of the eco-regional domains; and, most importantly, 4) an ability to test a given eco-regional scheme as a hypothesis.
This paper describes a hierarchical eco-regional framework (HEF) currently being constructed for Ontario. HEF is based on the scale-specific expression of ecological domain structure (geo-climatological parameters) and function (primary productivity). The approach relies on current advances in ecological hierarchy theory, remote sensing techniques, GIS methodologies, and statistical techniques. When completed, HEF will serve as a hypothesis which may be tested and validated at several different spatial scales.
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Perera, A.H., Baker, J.A., Band, L.E., Baldwin, D.J.B. (1996). A Strategic Framework to Eco-Regionalize Ontario. In: Sims, R.A., Corns, I.G.W., Klinka, K. (eds) Global to Local: Ecological Land Classification. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-1653-1_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-1653-1_9
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