Conservation Areas Reporting and Tracking System (CARTS)

Introduction
In March 2004, CCEA secured funding through Natural Resources Canada’s (NRCan’s) GeoConnections Program to develop a web-based application to enable seamless and standardized national reporting and mapping for all Canadian public conservation areas (commonly called protected areas). The CARTS web portal contains data from all federal, provincial and territorial jurisdictions. The network is distributed, allowing simultaneous access to multiple protected areas data sets at source, and ensuring that authority and updating of the data remains within each custodial agency.

The CARTS project is responding to a longstanding need to track and report on the status of Canada’s protected areas in a consistent, standardized and authoritative manner. The site will provide access to routine and standardized summary reports, graphs, and tables as well as online mapping and querying capabilities.

CARTS has many applications. Through its mapping interface and reporting capabilities, it contributes to Canada’s program on protected areas, which is led by the Canadian Wildlife Service. It also facilitates Canada’s response to the UN Convention on Biological Diversity and national reporting to the World Commission on Protected Areas (WCPA), a Canadian Parks Agency responsibility. CARTS will also support the design and expansion of new protected areas networks for species at risk, critical habitat, and integrated conservation planning. Numerous other users, such as other government departments (OGDs), environmental non government organizations (ENGOs), resource managers, industry, and the Canadian public, will benefit from having a single source of access to national protected area reports and an interactive mapping tool.

CARTS partnerships
Initial CCEA collaborators in the development of CARTS include protected area experts from each of Canada’s 10 provinces, three territories and four federal agencies that manage protected areas (Parks Canada Agency, Canadian Wildlife Service, Fisheries and Oceans Canada, and Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada). World Wildlife Fund Canada has also been a major collaborator. The Canadian Parks Council, representing Directors of parks from federal, provincial and territorial agencies, has supported the development of CARTS which has fostered jurisdictional cooperation. The NFIS steering committee and project management office have provided expertise, advice and have facilitated cooperation between NFIS (the Canadian Forestry Service’s National Forest Information System) jurisdictional partners and Provincial/Territorial conservation Agencies. Future partners will include ENGOs, who have land stewardship responsibilities, and other levels of government who manage protected areas.

Project accomplishments

• CARTS is endorsed by the Canadian Parks Council and the Canadian Council of resource Ministers
• The CCEA has prepared a standardized Canadian Guidebook to help interpret and apply international standards for protected areas management as provided by the World Conservation Union (IUCN)
• The national database schema consisting of 22 common attributes (in both French and English) has been developed in order to allow standard reports
• A series of algorithms have been designed to automatically create statistics, tables and graphs

Governance of CARTS
CARTS is led by Environment Canada in close cooperation with the CCEA. The broad terms of reference for the project include the following:

• Coordinate the evolution of CARTS to address current and future legislative, policy, science, technology, and information requirements as identified by the protected area community
• Develop strategies to maintain and expand the endorsement and support of government agencies, intergovernmental protected area bodies, and political bodies (where appropriate)
• Have the CARTS manager work closely with the CCEA on matters related to the content, uses, data provision, and marketing of CARTS as well as exploring funding opportunities for expanding CARTS capabilities
• Be accountable to agencies that fund the ongoing maintenance of the portal
• Enable CARTS to realize its full potential as a source of seamless, standardized, national protected area geospatial data
• Allow CARTS to evolve through new technologies and community needs

CCEA role
CCEA is playing a major role in the governance of CARTS. CCEA recognizes that the manager of CARTS must be accountable to all protected areas agencies who have shared their data. The CCEA also recognizes that it must be especially accountable to those government agencies that fulfill key national reporting roles, especially Parks Canada Agency (who report to IUCN on behalf of the Canadian Parks Council) and the Canadian Wildlife Service (who coordinate and implement the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) programme of work on protected areas for Canada.

The CCEA leads in the application of IUCN protected areas categories to Canadian protected areas. It is also responsible for the development of the IUCN guidebook for Canada. Now completed (2008), this information will be incorporated into the CARTS schema to allow further analyses and generate authoritative statistics.

CCEA has a long history in developing objective approaches to protected area issues. CCEA is inclusive in its membership and can ensure that a full range of protected areas stakeholders are represented. CCEA has a 3 year business plan in which CARTS will play a central role to data and information management priorities. Developing communication opportunities and products such as the Canadian Protected Areas Status Report 2000-2005 are strategic priorities of CCEA for which CARTS is vitally important.

CARTS – building on precedents
Since the early 1990s, the CCEA has provided national protected area data to the public. The earlier products included a national registry of protected areas in hard copy form, which was followed by digital versions. The digital versions culminated in a relational database that was kept current with informal update cycles. The database, known as the Canadian Conservation Areas Database (CCAD) was the primary authoritative national source for protected areas data until 2006, when it was updated, for the last time, as a complement to an Atlas of Canada digital protected area project (National Scale Frameworks).

CCAD was an important product, but improvements in Internet capabilities for participation (updating) and mapping (visualisation) allowed better use of the national compilation of protected areas data. CARTS is a response to those capabilities.

For further information please contact:
Robert Hélie
CCEA Secretariat

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