Threatened wilderness

The remaining intact areas of both the Kenogami Forest and the Ogoki Forest further north – the Ogoki-Kenogami Hotspot – are one of the best conservation opportunities in Ontario. [...] They have a low tolerance for human activity and need vast, unbroken tracts of mature forest and wetlands.66-70 Woodland caribou are considered by many to be an “umbrella species:” maintaining caribou across the landscape will ensure the maintenance of dozens of other species that share the same habitat.78 This means that the health of woodland caribou is an indicator of the broader health of the [...] Decades of logging and industrial development in Ontario have fragmented 70 per cent of the allocated forest.246 The Boreal region holds some of the largest quantities of terrestrial carbon in the world, and 85 per cent is stored in the soil. [...] The case studies found that, between 2000 and 2006, the footprint in the portions of the allocated forest that were analyzed expanded by 649,195 hectares, or 6.5 per cent of the area.252 When the findings from these studies are combined, and a one kilometre ecological buffer to account for edge effect and fragmentation is added to the physical area of change, the known expansion of the human footp [...] Protected areas of thousands of square kilometres – hundreds of thousands of hectares – of intact forest are necessary in order to keep caribou on the landscape in Ontario’s allocated forest.62 As discussed above, climate change has ramifications for the biodiversity and resilience of Boreal forests, and can also be mitigated by the preservation of intact Boreal forest.