Executive Committee Regular Meeting Addendum

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CORRESPONDENCE (for information unless raised for action)10.
10.6  R. Schuster re: Report “Carbon and Biodiversity Mapping and Assessment for the
Islands Trust Area” from 2014 letter dated February 28, 2023
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Executive Committee
  Addendum
Tuesday, March 7, 2023
10:00 am
Coast Bastion Hotel, Quadra Room, 2nd Floor
11 Bastion Street, Nanaimo BC

February 28, 2023 
 
Re: Report “Carbon and Biodiversity Mapping and Assessment for the Islands Trust Area” 
from 2014 
 
Dear Islands Trust Council members, 
 
I am submitting this letter for your consideration in light of recent discussions around a report I 
have written for Islands Trust back in 2014.  
My name is Dr. Richard Schuster. I hold a PhD from UBC and the topic of my doctoral work was 
“Systematic conservation planning in human-dominated landscapes: maximizing efficiency in 
biodiversity conservation via carbon sequestration and land management”. I am now the 
Director of Spatial Planning and Innovation at the Nature Conservancy of Canada. I am also an 
Adjunct Research Professor in the Biology Department at Carleton University. 
At the time I wrote the report for Islands Trust, I was in the final stages of my PhD (I submitted 
the report in March of 2014 and defended my PhD in June of 2014). In the report I have used 
the best available science at the time.  
Since the submission of the report I have published several peer reviewed papers on the topic 
ranging from local scales (e.g. CDF) to global scales (Hanson et al. 2019, 2022; Schuster et al. 
2019, 2020; Rodewald et al. 2019; Lin et al. 2020; Proctor et al. 2022; Vincent et al. 2022; 
Wilson et al. 2022; Chaplin-Kramer et al. 2023). I am also part of the development team of 
software the allows for this kind of analysis (https://prioritizr.net/), and I am the leading expert 
on this topic at the Nature Conservancy of Canada where I oversee the development of user 
friendly tools to interact with the sophisticated methods in the systematic conservation 
planning field. 
 
Below some specific comments about the report that I have led: 
Carbon information 
The basic methodology for this deliverable followed the “Evaluation of Carbon Storage within 
Forests in the Coastal Douglas-fir Zone” technical report prepared by Dr. Brad Seely a then 
researcher at UBC. Terrestrial Ecosystem Mapping (TEM) data provided by the Islands Trust was 
combined with TEM data for the CDF (MES 2008). 
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For the carbon modeling Seely used FORECAST (Kimmins et al. 1999), a stand-level forest 
ecosystem simulator that is one of two models approved by the BC Ministry of Forests for 
carbon budget assessments (Ministry of Environment 2011), and the only model calibrated for 
use in the CDF (Blanco et al. 2007) and linked to TEM (Seely et al. 2004). 
 
Biodiversity information 
The biodiversity information used in this report was produced through my PhD work. At the 
time, I was a PhD student in the lab of Prof. Peter Arcese at UB

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