BIOPHYSICAL PROCESSES AND BIOREGIONAL PLANNING - THE NIAGARA ESCARPMENT OF SOUTHERN ONTARIO, CANADA

The Niagara Escarpment is the dominant landscape feature of Southern O ntario and has been designated a UNESCO World Biosphere Reserve. As wi th many such natural features, the resource planning acid management s trategies developed tend to be based upon the present-day situation ra ther than upon a recognition of the changing and evolving nature of th e feature, To develop strategies incorporating change demands that a k nowledge be gained of the processes operating in those components of t he ecosystems in which measurable activity will take place within a pl anning framework; that is a timescale of several decades. In this part icular case, the context is natural resource planning for the scarp fa ce itself. The critical system elements are those related to earth sur face processes, forest ecosystem dynamics, and in particular, their in terrelationships. Different planning objectives require information at differing spatial scales. Yet these objectives must be related, wheth er they are local site-specific issues, or are related to the maintena nce of the biodiversity of the whole 725 km of the Escarpment. One way to achieve these goals is to establish a hierarchical system of spati ally nested land units. These units, however, must be based on the und erlying biophysical processes responsible for the dynamics in any one of these spatially determined frameworks. In this case, the underlying biophysical processes relating to geomorphology and forest ecosystem dynamics are found to be influenced by one of three dominant slope for ms. The recurrence of these slope forms throughout the Escarpment then permits 9 distinct regional land units to be identified. Within these units, site-specific analysis examines earth surface/forest interacti ons and change. Subsequently, from these site specific analyses data a re accumulated to develop a more general model of earth surface/forest ecosystem interaction for the Escarpment as a whole, (C) 1998 Elsevie r Science B.V. All rights reserved.