Natural Heritage Study public meetings

Oct 11, 2012

Photo: Alex Zeller, Michael Enright, Rory Baksh and Peter Young present County's Natural Heritage Study at a public meeting in Sydenham on Oct. 4.

Frontenac County presented their newly minted Natural Heritage Study at two public meetings last week.

The study’s aim is to identify a natural heritage system in the county. It was pinpointed as a “priority project” in the Frontenac ICSP [Integrated Community Sustainability Plan] and its results will be used as one of the foundation blocks for the county’s new Official Plan (OP)

By adopting the Natural Heritage Study (NHS) into the County’s OP, the authors believe that the county will be better able to determine policies for land use, environmental preservation, conservation and management, that will conform to the provincial policy statement.

The NHS project manager Michael Enright, ecologist Alex Zeller and land use planner Rory Baksh made the presentation to a handful of listeners at the Sydenham Public Library on October 4 following a similar presentation in Sharbot Lake on Oct.3.

Some of the over 14 components that were analyzed in the study were; deer and moose feeding/wintering habitats, trout sensitive lakes, bird nesting sites, woodlands, areas of natural and scientific interest, ecological corridors, wetlands, and areas of biodiversity.

The proposed mapping that is included in the study marks off lakes and wetlands, including provincially significant wetlands, all of these having been established previously. As well, and it is this part of the mapping that was cause for concern at the meetings, the mapping includes two added features. One is a series of long, narrow yellow strips that are newly designated “ecological corridors”. The second are swaths of land marked off as “areas of biodiversity” which were designated by the report in order to ensure the county maintains “full ecological representation and capture as much of the different habitats and ecological communities within the Natural Heritage System as possible”

These areas were created using the MARXAN GIS model, a computer-generated program that drew criticism from Gray Merriam, a retired professional landscape ecologist and former chair of the Frontenac County Stewardship Council.

“I have two objections to the study and the MARXAN model that was used to create it,” Merriam said when interviewed following the two meetings. “First, regarding the corridors, there is no evidence to suggest that wildlife will in fact move along these corridors. And 2) listing certain defined areas of specific concern while ignoring the rest of the countryside in between these places will not take into account the landscape in general, resulting in a lack of stewardship for all of these in between areas.”

Merriam said that the MARXAN model was designed specifically for suburban planning in more densely populated areas, areas that have only smaller isolated spots of natural environment left, not areas like Frontenac County with huge wild natural areas.

“Frontenac County is not suburbia so it does not make sense to use a model specifically developed for suburban planning. The study perhaps makes sense in the southern-most portion of the county but further north where the majority of land is wild, this kind of model does not make sense,” he said.

The authors of the study proposed three possible options for how the study can be incorporated into county planning. Two of these would place limitations on development based on some of the designations in the plan, while the third would leave those kinds of decisions in the purview of the local municipalities.

Project manager Peter Young said the next step in the process will be to take the information gathered from the two public meetings and then go to County Council in December.

Young invites anyone who did not attend the public meetings to look at the study online at www.frontenaccounty.ca, and he invites their feedback.