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CARTS Produces National View of Canada's Protected Areas

At the World Commission on Protected Areas in February 2004, Canada committed to report internationally on the status of its protected areas. Protected areas, such as national, provincial, and territorial parks; migratory bird sanctuaries; and ecological reserves are established by both government and non-government organizations. Until 2005, there was no consistent way of describing protected areas in Canada and assessing their protection levels. This shortcoming hindered Canada's ability to meet its international reporting targets.

Capitalizing on the infrastructure being built by GeoConnections and its partners, two national organizations collaborated to develop the Conservation Areas Reporting and Tracking System (CARTS). The Canadian Council on Ecological Areas (CCEA) developed a made-in-Canada guide to applying an international classification standard so that protected areas could be consistently described across Canada. The project office of the National Forest Information System (NFIS), a GeoConnections funded initiative, guided the implementation of protected areas databases on its suite of servers hosted by jurisdictions across the country. Lastly, GeoConnections supported the development of a CCEA reporting website that enables users to go to one place to find information on the state of Canada's designated protected areas.

Efficiently meeting Canada's reporting obligations

Developed with $100,000 of funding and support from GeoConnections and with in-kind contributions from other partners, CARTS excels as a tool for international reporting. Environment Canada's Canadian Wildlife Service uses CARTS to respond to the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity; and the Canadian Parks Agency uses the system to report to the World Commission on Protected Areas. CARTS allows these Canadian authorities to produce national reports more accurately and faster than ever before.

By adopting standard definitions of 16 protected area characteristics, CARTS lets users compare Canada's protected areas with one another and with other areas around the world. Researchers, analysts, and policy-makers can use the system to query data and create reports, graphs, tables, and maps-gaining better insight into some of our most fragile ecosystems.

Without CARTS, generating a broad view of protected areas would be tedious and time consuming. One would have to scour many data sources: provincial government ministries, federal departments, non-government agencies-some with databases, others without, and some with current data, others without. "That challenge has been problematic in the past," said Robert Vanderkam, Environment Canada's technical coordinator for CARTS. "With CARTS, however, the effort is made once to connect these disparate datasets at source, and the comprehensive results are available to everyone."

Other applications for CARTS exist, too. For example, the system could be used by a mining company to determine whether a certain parcel of land prohibits or restricts mineral exploration or forestry operations. Researchers could use it to assess whether protected areas adequately safeguard certain wildlife species.

Leveraging distributed networks and the data standards of the GeoConnections-led infrastructure

CARTS operates on the principle that information sharing works best when data custodians maintain the authoritative version of their data and make that version available online to users in real time. Sharing data in this distributed-network environment requires the use of nationally and internationally endorsed standards for data sharing and mapping. These common standards allow users to not only draw upon protected areas data, but also to integrate, say, forest-cover or ecosystem data from source agencies. This data-integration capability enables the creation of maps that are more revealing and useful than any single data layer can generate.

By capitalizing on a distributed network of data sources and the GeoConnections-led infrastructure based on common standards, a CARTS user can call up information from provincial data servers and meld it into a national overview of Canada's protected areas. "Users can create a national map or statistics," said Mr. Vanderkam. "The technology allows direct access to 10 or 15 sources that are serving data in its current form. Such an approach avoids the circulation of multiple copies and out-dated versions of the data."

Thanks to CARTS, Canada now has an excellent tool to meet its reporting obligations and help monitor its protected areas.

Partners include:

Canadian Council on Ecological Areas
Canadian Parks Council
Environment Canada-Canadian Wildlife Service
Environment Canada-Knowledge Integration Directorate
Fisheries and Oceans Canada
National Forest Information System Steering Committee and Project Management Office
Natural Resources Canada-Canadian Forest Service (National Forest Information System)
GeoConnections
Parks Canada Agency
NatureServe Canada
World Wildlife Fund (Canada)