(June 04, 2019)   -   Canada has committed to protecting 17% of our land base by 2020. So far, we're only at 10.7%. We also need to do a better job of identifying areas that are well suited to protecting biodiversity. That is why we are excited to launch a new conservation tool called Key Biodiversity Areas (KBAs) in Canada. Identifying Key Biodiversity Areas can help us pinpoint areas that serve many different species or that are highly unique and/or under severe threat. 

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(June 03, 2019)   -   With forest fire season underway in Western Canada, Wildlife Conservation Society Canada has just released a timely report on the ecological value of burned and beetle-killed forests.

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(May 16, 2019)   -   We all benefit from healthy ecosystems and biological diversity. It should not be up to any one community to bear the burden of making long-overdue changes to the way we approach protecting wildlife and wild places. Justina Ray discusses the contentious issue of caribou conservation in British Columbia.

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(May 10, 2019)   -   Dr. Justina Ray, WCS Canada President, provides comments on the changes made to Ontario's Endangered Species Act as the U.N. releases a scientific report detailing Earth's biodiversity crisis.

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(March 01, 2019) Matthew Scrafford is the Wolverine Conservation Scientist within Ontario’s Northern Boreal Landscape program at WCS Canada. In this piece for the Thunder Bay Field Naturalist, Matt describes how he found himself a wolverine expert, and the challenges and rewards he faces trying to conserve the species in the field. Read Matthew's article in Nature Northwest here

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(February 20, 2019) With ice melting in Canada’s Northwest Passage, the area will soon be a new route for international shipping. This will have potentially big impacts on the life there. We are studying the area and planning for this with local communities, government scientists, and managers. For one part of that work, we are going to document the marine life in the western Canadian Arctic, in particular the remote and mostly frozen Viscount Melville Sound. Let’s look under the ice!Read more on the&nb...

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(January 31, 2019) Are protections for endangered species just another bureaucratic burden that is holding back economic development in Ontario? That’s the below-the-surface premise that seems to lie behind the Ford government’s latest action to “streamline” environmental regulation in this province. Last week, the government announced a review of the Endangered Species Act, saying that the current act is “unclear, administratively burdensome, time consuming and costly for applic...

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(October 30, 2018) “Caribou: one hoof in the grave.” So read the epitaph on a two-metre-high tombstone Greenpeace erected in front of federal environment and climate change minister Catherine McKenna’s office on May 1, 2018. The stunt aimed to draw attention to the plight of the country’s boreal woodland caribou, the protection of which has faced “many delays” according to a mid-April 2018 report from the federal environment commissioner.All of Canada’s caribou s...

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(October 01, 2018)  The horrors of right whales drowning in tangles of fishing ropes and the alarming prospect of endangered orcas crossing paths with oil-laden tankers has created more than a few headaches for the federal government. From the Atlantic to the Pacific, the feds have been forced to respond to public—and legal—demands that more be done to save threatened cetaceans.But Canada actually borders three oceans and it is in that often overlooked third ocean—the Arctic—that the f...

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(September 12, 2018) To mark the Global Climate Action Summit, WCS scientists have authored a series of blogs about how we are working with Indigenous Peoples to advance conservation and climate action, from the Congo to Canada’s Boreal.  In the final part of the series, WCS Canada’s Cheryl Chetkiewicz looks at the important role of boreal forests, wetlands and peatlands in storing carbon and how Indigenous Protected and Conserved Areas could play a central role in helping t...

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