No abstract

The interactive effects of climate change and invasive alien species (IAS) pose serious threats to biodiversity, ecosystems and human well-being worldwide. In particular, IAS are predicted to experience widespread changes in distribution in response to climate change, with many expanding their ranges into new areas. However, the two drivers of global change are seldom considered together in policy and management. We conducted a knowledge synthesis to assess the state of research on IAS range shifts under climate change in Canada. We found that the study of IAS distribution changes caused by climate change is a relatively new field of inquiry that integrates research in the areas of ecology, conservation biology, and environmental sciences. The multidisciplinary dimensions of the issue are largely overlooked in the scholarly literature, with most studies having a purely natural science perspective. Very little original research has occurred in the field to date; instead literature reviews are common. Research focuses on modeling range changes of current IAS threats, rather than predicting potential future IAS threats. The most commonly studied IAS already occur in Canada as native species that have spread beyond their range (e.g., lyme disease, mountain pine beetle, smallmouth bass) or as established invaders (e.g., gypsy moth). All of these IAS are expected to expand northward with climate change, resulting in widespread negative impacts on forest and freshwater biodiversity, carbon sequestration, and public health. Many barriers to predicting IAS range change under climate change are identified in the literature, including the complexity of the issue, lack of ecological data, and failure to integrate climate change – IAS interactions into research, policy, and management. Recommendations for increased research and monitoring, and the need for policy and management reform predominate in the literature.

This paper examines the social capital that evolved in the Sustainable Forest Management Network (SFMN), one of the Canadian Networks of Centres of Excellence. Our longitudinal study shows a sevenfold increase in the total number of researchers and a high density of relationships among (researchers from) provinces across the country. The results of a social network analysis revealed that 52.6 percent of the network researchers maintained the same number of collaborators while 46.7 percent increased their number of collaborators enormously: the maximum increase in number of collaborators being 6900 percent and the minimum 6 percent. A bibliometric analysis suggested that the number of publications was strongly correlated to measures of social capital. From a science and innovation policy perspective, the finding that more than half of the researchers in the SFMN did not increase their personal networks of collaborators raises important questions. A theoretical model is proposed to examine whether funding agencies should focus on fostering various network structures and evolutions or rely on competition in the distribution of research funds through networks. The proposed model is designed to measure the impact of various network structures on the development of social capital and research output.

The Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources (OMNR) operates a fleet of nine CL-215 airtankers for forest fire control. The aircraft are based at a small number of airports that serve as home bases, from which they are deployed to a larger set of airports that serve as initial attack bases for fire fighting operations each day. We helped regional fire managers derive subjective airtanker deployment rules that specified how many airtankers were to be deployed at each initial attack base each day. We then developed a mathematical programming model that was used to help identify a home-basing strategy that would minimize the average annual cost of satisfying daily airtanker deployment demands. Our analysis provided OMNR decision makers with valuable insight into airtanker management and was used to help decide where to base the OMNR airtankers for the 1993 and subsequent fire seasons.