Environmental prediction: early detection of atmosphere-land use changes in Ontario, Canada

An Integrated Mapping Assessment Project (IMAP) was launched in 1999 to better integrate atmosphere and land use changes, biodiversity, population development and human health issues and to provide early warning detection, environmental prediction and policy advice. The IMAP assessment process consists of an assembly framework to collect a series of scientifically linked maps, to share mapping resources and to integrate results at appropriate decision-making scales. The initial assessment focussed on the evaluation of ecological-based climate surfaces versus climate-digital elevation models. From this process has emerged integrated case studies for southern Ontario, Canada. Case studies will be discussed that illustrate the significant influence of atmospheric heat on land use management practices, indicating that slight climate warming has the potential to significantly change land use, landscapes and species distributions in rural Ontario. Fish survey results from one rural-base healthy aquatic ecosystem in southern Ontario, for example, indicate that there has been a significant shift from a coldwater to a warmwater aquatic ecosystem in spite of historical and decreased agricultural land-use in the area. These and other results indicate the importance of monitoring, detecting and predicting the impacts of gradual and subtle warming trends on aquatic and terrestrial environments.