Statement of Interest
Thomas Meredith,
Department of Geography,
McGill University
Montreal,
Canada, H3A 2K6
Contents
1: Research Interests
2: Abstract
3: Brief Biography.
1. Research Interests
My academic interest is in the conservation and management of ecological
resources with a particular focus on environmental impact assessment and
community response to environmental change. Working with Parks Canada, I
became aware of the need for new approaches to ecological conservation
management. Through my PhD in plant population ecology and subsequent
work in applied conservation, my research has been based on recognition
of a need for solid science as well as solid linkages with the community
of resource users. This arises from the belief that effective
environmental protection will come not solely from either draconian
legislation or land sequestration, but rather from an aggregation of
local environmental systems that involve human communities in sustainable
relationships with their biophysical resource base. I have worked with
native communities in Quebec (the Naskapi and Inuit), as well as with
rural resource communities in Quebec (La Mauricie), British Columbia,
Mexico and Africa.
My link with land use modelling is that I am interested in the
"cybernetics" of change within community-environmental systems and am
attempting to determine how geographic information and spatial analysis
procedure can best support community decision-making processes. This is
work-in-progress. To me the particularly interesting element of
modelling land cover change is a paradox discussed by the Canadian
Global Change Program panel on "Critical Environmental Zone." That is: if
models of land use change are both accurate and relevant, they will
modify human behaviour so that the predictions based on the model are
wrong. In other words, if models of change are simply based on historic
probabilities of change, they fail to recognize the capacity of "the
system" to learn and modify those probabilities. Models can be seen as
having two purposes, one is simply to describe from the outside what is
going on (and so the model is not really a part of the system) and the
second is to provide information about futures so that undesirable
futures can be avoided (and so, in this case the model IS a part of the
adaptation process it is describing because it will modify actions). In
conservation work, the second category of model is of most interest.
The question I would pose is how do models incorporate learning from the
models?
In a Mexican project we assumed continued rates of land cover conversion
and demonstrated what the landscape might look like in 10 and 20 years
given trends of deforestation and urbanization. The intention was to
modify land use decisions that will affect land cover change by
demonstrating a model that, in effect, would prevent what it predicted.
This exercise was based on an assumption that the community assigned a
value the forest and would make appropriate decisions if the temporal
scale of land cover change was made visible. But in this case, no attempt
was made to quantify factors that would influence the probability that
evidence of change in the environment would lead to change in human
behaviour.
By contrast, in a project in Tanzania, a graduate student and I have been
trying relate very specific use values for environmental resources
associated with land cover types. For example, what is a given species of
tree used for, how important is that use and what substitutes are there
for it? That quantification of value would be a weighting that would
influence the probability of compensatory action being taken by human
actors in the landscape once predictions of land cover change were made
known to them. The following is an abstract for a paper we are preparing
on this work.
2. Abstract
Using value estimates for woody species and information about land cover
change to identify conservation priorities in Northern Tanzania.
(Draft).
Wynet Smith, T.C. Meredith, and T. Johns
Identifying conservation priorities in communities dependent on
ecological resources requires consideration of local use patterns, the
extractive impacts of local uses, and of the individual species
availability and distribution. Merging of these information sets can
help to identify locally valued species and species under pressure.
Use-value is defined as a function of number of uses and of availability
of substitutes. Conservation priorities can be expected to be a function
of use-value, abundance, and degree of endangerment. Endangerment is a
function of the rate at which the land cover class for a given species is
being lost. Data on use patterns of the Batemi in north-central Tanzania
are combined with abundance and distribution data and used to explore
methodologies for identifying possible conservation
priorities.
3. Biography
Dr. Meredith completed a Bachelor of Environmental Studies (geography) at
the University of Waterloo in 1974. After a year of travel in Africa he
was awarded a Parks Canada scholarship for an interdisciplinary M.Sc.
(botany, geography, zoology) and a Diploma in Conservation at University
College London. He proceeded directly from that to Ph.D. research in
plant population ecology at the University of Cambridge. In 1979 he
joined the Department of Geography at McGill University and, from 1981 to
1993, was the director of the university's Environmental Studies Program.
Until 1994 he was convenor of a Canadian Global Change Program panel on
Critical Environmental Zones and is still a member of the International
Geographic Union's Commission on Critical Zones. The academic year
1987-88 was spent in Senegal and Nairobi (UNEP and University of Nairobi)
and 1994-1995 was spent as a visiting researcher at University of
California (Santa Barbara) and at the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de
Mexico.
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