Terrestrial and Freshwater Portfolio: Canadian Rocky Mountains Ecoregional Conservation Assessment

The Canadian Rocky Mountains ecoregion (CRM) covers approximately 27.1 million hectares (66.9 million acres) extending across three states and two provinces. The ecoregion extends over a large portion of the Rocky Mountains from southeastern British Columbia and southwestern Alberta to northern Idaho, northwestern Montana and a small part of northeastern Washington. Elevation ranges from 915 m to 3,954 m (3,000 ft to 12,972 ft), with Mt. Robson (BC) being the highest peak in the ecoregion. Geologically, this ecoregion is very complex, containing bedrock of sedimentary, igneous, and metamorphic origin; and is largely characterized by steep glaciated over thrust mountains with sharp alpine ridges and cirques at higher elevations. Historic and current glaciation has sculpted the mountainous landscape filling many of the intermountain valleys with glaciofluvial deposits and moraines.

Goals for conservation targets define the number and spatial distribution of on-the-ground occurrences. As a general rule, our goal is to conserve multiple examples of each target, stratified across its geographic range in such a way that we capture: 

1.  the variability of the target and its environment, and 
2.  redundant occurrences to provide a high likelihood of persistence in the face of environmental stochastically.

We define a viable species or population as one that has a high probability of continued existence over a specified period of time. Conservation goals should support the target species in continually changing ecosystems, looking into the future at least 100 years or 10 generations. While that concept of viability could be said to apply to all targets, in practice we use several closely related, though distinct, groups of targets. It is important to distinguish “fine filter” (species) targets from “coarse filter” (communities and ecosystems) targets in terms of conservation strategies. Fine filter strategies appropriately emphasize maintenance of multiple occurrences or viable populations. . In addition to species viability, coarse filter strategies emphasize the conservation of ecosystem functions (e.g. air, water, nutrient cycling, etc.), perhaps better characterized as ecological integrity at an ecoregion scale (Pimentel et al. 2000). While conservation goals for species emphasize representation and redundancy, coarse filter goals focus more strongly on capturing the full range ecological variability and environmental gradients.