Coastal Exposure to Sea Level Rise
Figure 4 from Willard-Stepan et al. 2025. Building inundation by country. a–d The percentage of each country’s current building stock centroids inundated at high tide per meter of LSLR for (a) 0.5 m, (b) 2 m, (c) 5 m, and (d) 15 m scenarios.
|
Assessing the Exposure of Buildings to Long-Term Sea Level Rise Across the Global South
Coastal and sea level rise risk assessments often focus on short-term timelines and coarse spatial units, limiting understanding of how much existing infrastructure is physically exposed to long-term sea level rise. Since the spatio-temporal progression of this inundation is complex, there are little estimates that have been made of sea level rise impacts on the built environment beyond 2100. In this paper, we developed the first building-level, spatially explicit assessment of exposure to local sea level rise across Africa, Southeast Asia, and South and Central America. Using satellite-derived building footprints, elevation data and local tidal levels, we mapped exposure for approximately 840 million buildings, showing how risk increases as sea levels rise from 0.5 to 20 meters. Results reveal the scale and geography of long-term coastal vulnerability, showing that even modest sea level rise places millions of buildings at risk and establishing a critical baseline for long-term coastal adaptation planning. |
Ecological Connectivity & Wildlife Corridors
Figure 2(d) of Parrott et al. 2019, animation illustrating the whole process of deriving the weighted skeleton beginning with the current density map.
|
Planning for ecological connectivity across scales of governance in a multifunctional regional landscape
Rapid land-use change and fragmented governance make it difficult to maintain wildlife movement corridors across ecologically connected landscapes. In this paper, we extended the Circuitscape connectivity framework to operate across large regions and developed the “skeleton” approach, translating complex connectivity surfaces into corridor networks usable by planners. This work enabled actionable, multi-scale corridor planning in biodiversity hotspots, directly supporting land-use decisions that maintain ecological connectivity under development pressure. |
Protected Areas Expansion and Management
Figure 2 in Wulder et al. 2018, National map of ecozones with pie charts individually illustrating the breakdown of protected areas by ecozone into IUCN categories. Note: Ecozones differ with respect to the total amount of area protected.
|
Context and Opportunities for Expanding Protected Areas in Canada
Despite Canada’s vast protected landscapes and being one of the few nations, globally, with the capacity to expand its protected areas, its conservation network has historically fallen short of national and international targets and remains unevenly distributed across ecological regions. In turn, in this paper we developed a science-based framework to translate Canada’s commitment to protect 17% of its land into spatially explicit expansion strategies. We identified strategic opportunities to expand conservation by diversifying management and governance, specifically by formalizing remote “de facto” protected areas and recognizing Indigenous and privately-led conservation efforts. By emphasizing flexible protection categories, we provide policy-relevant pathways to expand Canada’s terrestrial protected area system into one that allows for a long-term resilient, connected network that protects biodiversity, connectivity, and land across Canada. |
Archives
Representative landscapes
|
Click here for a pdf copy of “From The Redwood Forest To The Gulf Stream Waters: Human Signature Nearly Ubiquitous In Representative U.S. Landscapes”.
In the April 2010 issue of Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, we identified exemplar landscapes of the continental United States. These landscapes were selected using the 1992 Metaland database by the affinity propagation algorithm, which quickly and objectively chooses representative items from large sets. |
Metaland
|
This tool allows researchers and policy makers to understand the distribution of landscape metric values across large areas, and to identify the locations of and select landscapes according to any number of pattern-oriented criteria.
See the publication here. A free PDF copy of the Bioscience article, "Metaland: a publicly available tool for characterizing spatial patterns and statistical context of landscape metrics across large areas" should be visible on that page. |
