Protected areas in Canada: decade of change

The last decade has witnessed more changes in protected area systems in Canada than any other. The area set aside has more than doubled, and almost 7 percent of Canada's ecosystems are now protected compared with 3 percent in 1989. Several high-profile reports have indicated a decline in ecological integrity of protected area systems. Major changes in legislation and policy have followed with a new National Parks Act, National Marine Conservation Areas Act, a Parks Canada Agency Act and a revised national park's policy. The paper describes these major changes and their implications, provides understanding of why they occurred and suggests ongoing challenges facing protected area systems in Canada in the future.     

Evaluating the use of IKONOS satellite imagery in lowland Maya settlement archaeology

This article presents an extensive evaluation, in several contiguous or near-contiguous areas, of the viability of IKONOS satellite imagery in detecting sub-canopy Maya settlement in Peten, Guatemala. Initial research in and around San Bartolo, Guatemala, led to the conclusion that IKONOS imagery could be highly effective in detecting and predicting Maya settlement of the Preclassic and Classic periods, in zones of dense occupation near swampy lowlands known as bajos. The pioneering methods at San Bartolo are applied here to other regions in the Maya lowlands, but with mixed or unpromising results. Preliminary evaluation indicates that local climate, geology, hydrology, topography, pedology, and vegetation differ dramatically in these other regions, with consequences for wider application of the settlement signature discerned at San Bartolo. Possible reasons for these difficulties are offered in this paper, along with ways to strengthen the use of multispectral imagery in archaeological survey of tropical forests.     

A Global Group of Worriers

Book reviewed in this article:
Wilfried Loth and Jürgen Osterhammel, Internationale Geschichte: Themen – Ergebnisse – Aussichten     

The natural hazard sector's engagement with Indigenous peoples: a critical review of CANZUS countries

Natural hazard management agencies across the settler countries Canada, Australia, Aotearoa New Zealand, and the United States (or CANZUS countries) are presently involved in an increasing range of collaborative and consultative engagements with Indigenous peoples. However, perhaps because these engagements are diverse and relatively recent, little has been written about how they emerged and, from these agencies' perspectives, little is known about how these engagements find their motivation within government natural hazard management frameworks. In this article, we review existing academic and grey literature to categorise the origins of recent and present engagements and then identify and elaborate on the key rationales informing natural hazard management agencies' interactions with Indigenous peoples. We argue both that the broad principles of sustainability and inclusion have transformed these interactions and that developmentalist approaches and an overemphasis on Indigenous peoples' traditional knowledge can sometimes undermine this work. Incorporating critiques of settler colonialism relevant to the CANZUS context, this review aims to support established, emerging, and future collaborative engagements by investigating and analysing the literature to date.