Rouge Park Toronto Region Biodiversity Blueprint for Conservation Plan

Ken Lam

052375086

December 12, 2007

Professor John Fraser

Rouge Park Toronto Region Biodiversity Blueprint for Conservation Plan

Ken Lam

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1. EXECUTIVE SUMMARY 3

2. INTRODUCTION 3

3. ABOUT ROUGE PARK 4

3.1. LANDSCAPE PATTERNS AND LAND USE 4

3.2. VEGETATION 6

3.3. OWNERSHIP 7

4. METHODOLOGY 7

4.1. QUICKBIRD IMAGERY & OTHER DATA 9

4.2. ANALYSIS PROCESS 9

5. RESULTS 10

6. DISCUSSION 14

7. NEXT STEPS 15

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1. EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Rouge Park is a large natural environment park located in East Scarborough (East Toronto) and Markham

in York Region. What is significant about Rouge Park is that it is the largest nature park within an urban

area in North America. The Rouge Park Toronto Region Biodiversity Blueprint for Conservation Plan

outlines the methods and results of an ecological assessment of the biodiversity of the Rouge Park in

Toronto. The Plan will use GIS to assemble, map and analyze data in the Rouge Park area. The main

purpose of a Biodiversity Blueprint for Conservation Plan is to map existing and potential conservation

sites based on available data. It organizes data to help individuals and agencies conserve biodiversity by

identifying high-quality natural areas of biodiversity. This project was formally known as Little Rouge

Creek Central Valley Biodiversity Conservation Plan. “Little Rouge Creek Central Valley” has been

replaced with “Rouge Park Toronto Region”; this change means that more land surface is being covered

by this Conservation Plan, and the term “Blueprint” has been added, which signifies the importance the

GIS tool has in this Conservation Plan. What has not changed is that this is still a plan for conservation.

2. INTRODUCTION

The Rouge Park Toronto Region Biodiversity Blueprint for Conservation Plan is the first one of its kind to

use GIS as a landscape level analysis tool to map the terrestrial biodiversity in the Rouge Park area. The

purpose of the Plan is to use spatial imagery collected from satellites and the analyzing power of GIS to

create a biodiversity blueprint of Rouge Park in Toronto, which creates an output that maps the land

cover types within the park. Individuals and agencies can use this biodiversity blueprint as a backbone to

their own conservation plans. A couple of examples of how the biodiversity blueprint may be utilized is

to identify areas where ecological restoration is required in the park, or where the Rouge Park

committee can expropriate some suitable adjacent land to expand the Park further. The second purpose

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of this Conservation Plan is to look at the wildlife patches and corridors within the Rouge Park

boundaries and see if they are ecologically healthy and functional.

3. ABOUT ROUGE PARK

Rouge Park is part of the Rouge River watershed, which is 337 km2 in area. Its headwaters are found in

the Oak Ridges Moraine, and its rivers drain into Lake Ontario. Rogue Park is 47 km2 in area, and is the

largest natural park in an urban environment in North America. It includes lands in the Rouge River

watershed as well as lands in the neighbouring Petticoat Creek and Duffins Creek watershed. Rouge Park

in Toronto, which is the study area for this Conservation Plan, is 24.22 km2 in area, and has several

landmark features within its boundaries (Figure 1):

 Toronto Zoo

 Retired Beare Landfill Site

 Farmland

3.1. LANDSCAPE PATTERNS AND LAND USE

Rouge Park is home to a variety of different land use. Much of the park is forested; however much of it is

agricultural land, as mentioned above. One of Rouge Park’s mission statements is to maintain and

protect these agricultural lands, since they have been part of Toronto’s history. Other uses are the

Toronto Zoo and the retired Beare Landfill Site. The Toronto Zoo is a relatively popular tourist

destination owned by the City of Toronto, and is designated as a day use area of Rouge Park. Over 1.16

million people visited the zoo in 2006, making Rouge Park a heavily visited area (Toronto Zoo, 2006).

Due to these high numbers, there is a substantial land use for parking lots for Zoo visitor’s vehicles. The

Beare Landfill Site received municipal waste from 1968 and was decommissioned in 1983. The landfill

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Ken Lam

Figure 1: A map of Rouge Park in Toronto with boundaries of landmarks within the Park: Farmland,
Toronto Zoo and the former Beare Landfill Site.

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Ken Lam

capacity was pegged at 9 million tonnes, and was filled to capacity in 1983. Now it is being used as

“landfill gas (LFG) to energy” site, where the Ontario Power Generation purchases the electricity

produced from the facility’s owner, ES Fox Limited. The energy generated from the LFG collected from

the Beare Landfill in 2001 was 26.6 million kWh, power for roughly 2300 homes (The Green Lane, 2006).

From these “non-natural” land uses, the forested areas in Rouge Park become fragmented, or patched,

although these patches still seem to be connected by wildlife corridors (Figure 1). Wildlife corridors

allow animals to move and migrate between patches of natural areas, and it may improve some species’

chances of survival. Also, there are some species, known as interior patch species that rely on interior

forest patches to survive predation by edge species.

The riparian vegetation corridor buffer zone surrounding Little Rouge Creek is pretty narrow in some

places, as seen between the two large farmland patches in Figure 1. Later sections in this Plan will

measure how narrow some of these areas really are.

3.2. VEGETATION

Rouge Park is a transition zone to the northern Great Lakes-St. Lawrence Forest, or also known as the

Mixed Forest, and the southern Carolinian Forest. It is home to deciduous tree species such as Red

Maple (Acer rubrum), Staghorn Sumac (Rhus typhina), Trembling Aspen (Populus tremuloides), and Black

Oak (Quercus velutina). Black Oak is in its upper most range here, and is an important species in the

Carolinian Forest. Coniferous trees such as the Eastern Hemlock (Tsuga Canadensis) and White Pine

(Pinus strobes) are prevalent in Rouge Park.

The exotic species that the Rouge Park is having problems controlling currently is the Dog Strangling

Vine (Vincetoxicum rossicum). Part of the milkweed family, it has appeared only 3-5 years ago in Rouge

Park, but now sometimes make up to 90% of the undergrowth in forests. There are currently no known

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Ken Lam

selective control methods for this plant, and it poses a very serious threat to the rare and native plant

species in Rouge Park.

Figure 2: A field of Dog Strangling Vine, an

exotic and fast-spreading plant in Rouge
Park

Source: http://www.cwss-
scm.ca/Weeds/images/SDdog_flowering_
plants.jpg

3.3. OWNERSHIP

Rouge Park is administered by the Rouge Park Alliance, made up of members in all levels of government,

and also the TRCA. These three levels of government and the TRCA each own some of the land that

makes up Rouge Park, as well as private landowners that own the agricultural land.

3. METHODOLOGY

This section will describe the methods used to produce the Rouge Park Toronto Region Biodiversity

Blueprint for Conservation Plan.

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Figure 3: A map of the Quickbird satellite image used to perform the analysis for the Conservation Plan. A
little piece of imagery is missing in the NW corner of Rouge Park.

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3.1. QUICKBIRD IMAGERY & OTHER DATA

The satellite imagery used as the “canvas” for the creation of the Plan was Quickbird satellite imagery,

borrowed from Ryerson Library. The resolution of the image is 60cm x 60cm, and was acquired from the

Quickbird satellite owned by DigitalGlobe. As seen in Figure 3, a bit of imagery is missing in the

northwest corner of Rouge Park. That is because the image file did not cover that part of the park, and

the connecting file that would have covered that corner was too large a file for the computer to handle.

Other data used were the Toronto Wetlands layer file, and this allowed ArcMap (the program used to do

the GIS analysis) to overlay the wetland data onto the satellite imagery, and made the identification of

the wetlands in the imagery clear, and Toronto surface water and Toronto parks boundary lines were

also used, which were used in the same manner as the wetlands file.

3.2. ANALYSIS PROCESS

In satellite imagery, and in fact all remotely sensed imagery, different cover types have an unique

signature, in that they can be identified and differentiated from each other by their unique spectral

response patterns. This is what is called image classification. There are two methods that can be used to

classify an image: supervised and unsupervised. With supervised classification, the GIS user develops the

spectral signatures of the known categories of cover types, for example “urban” and “forest”, and then

the GIS program assigns each pixel of the remote sensed image to the cover type to which its signature

is most similar. With unsupervised classification, the software groups pixels into categories of similar

signatures, and then the user identifies what cover types those categories represent. This Biodiversity

Blueprint for Conservation Plan used the supervised method to create the land cover map.

The steps used in supervised classification may be summarized as follows:

1. Load the remote sensed image into ArcMap. It has to be in raster format.

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2. Locate representative examples of each cover type that can be identified in the remote sensed

image. These representative sites are called “training sites”.

3. Digitize the polygons around each of these training sites, and assign a unique identifier for each

cover type. The identifier must be in a short/long integer number format.

4. ArcMap analyzes the pixels within the training sites and creates a spectral signature for each of

the cover types.

5. ArcMap classifies the entire image by considering each pixel one at a time, comparing its

particular signature with each of the known signatures.

4. RESULTS

The Rouge Park Toronto Region Biodiversity Blueprint for Conservation Plan identified 5 land cover

types in its classification, and the percentages of each in Rouge Park (Figure 4).

Landcover Types in Rouge Park in Percentages

Wetland Water Forest Open Field/Farmland Urban

6%
15%

5%

39%

35%

Figure 4: Land cover types in Rouge Park in Percentages

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Figure 5: A map of the Land Cover Types (Ecological Systems) in Rouge Park. This map was created by
using the supervise classification method of image classification

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Rouge Park is comprised of a diverse network of forests, wetlands, meadows, streams and rivers, and

human landscapes such as farmland and urban structures.

 35% of Rouge Park remains covered in forest, and comprises of a combination of Carolinian

Forest and Mixed Forest tree species.

 39% is meadows, grasslands, developed or empty farmland. Meadows are typified by

 Herbaceous species such as Canadian Goldenrod (Solidago Canadensis), Staghorn Sumac (Rhus

typhina) and Common Milkweed (Asclepisa syriaca) make up the meadow areas. Grasslands are

usually human disturbed sites that are used for overflow parking for Toronto Zoo patrons.

 15% of the park is wetlands, and the majority of them are located at the Little Rouge Creek delta

at Lake Ontario.

Figure 5 shows the map of the Land Cover Types, and it fits well with the Figure 1 Landmarks map. There

are a few fragmented forest plots within the Farmland areas in Figure 1, which the image classification

process was able to distinguish as seen in Figure 5. The Beare Landfill Site has been classified as an open

field/farmland land cover type, which is the most correct given the choices. The Toronto Zoo and its

human-made structures have been distinguished as an urban land cover type, and the Zoo complex

looks very intricate in Figure 5.

An area of concern is the riparian vegetation corridor of Little Rouge Creek, which appears to have a

couple of areas that lose connectivity. These three areas are shown in Figure 6. Distance measurements

done on ArcMap confirm that both the northern area of concern (AC1) and the southern area of concern

(AC3) completely lose their connectivity in the riparian vegetation corridor, while the middle area of

concern (AC2) has a corridor width of 200 metres.

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Figure 6: Map of Rouge Park with the image classification showing the three areas of concern, due to a
break or narrowing in the connectivity of the Little Rogue Creek riparian vegetation corridor

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5. DISCUSSION

The AC1 and AC3 do not have any connectivity in the riparian vegetation corridor due to power line

corridors cutting through the area, and in the case of AC1 (Figure 7), a railway line cuts through the

corridor as well.

Figure 7: A diagram of Area of Concern

1 where the riparian vegetation
corridor has lost its connectivity due to
a power line corridor and a railway line.
Arrows point to power transmission
towers

Figure 8: A diagram of Area of Concern 2

where the riparian vegetation corridor is
only 200 metres wide

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Figure 8 shows AC2 and its narrow riparian vegetation corridor width. In the year 2000, the Provincial

Government, recognizing the importance of the Little Rouge Creek wildlife corridor as a habitat for a

number of area-sensitive and interior forest species, committed to the dedication of a 600 metre wide

corridor for Rogue Park purposes. This was mentioned in the Rouge North Management Plan created in

2001. This 600 metre standard may be possible in Rouge Park north of Steeles Avenue, but Rogue Park

in the Toronto Region has farmland that the City seems keen on keeping for historical reasons, as they

are the only agricultural lands left in the City of Toronto. AC2 is the narrowest part of the riparian

vegetation corridor at 200 metres, but there are many areas where 600 metre width is not attained,

mostly in the northern part of Rouge Park Toronto Region, due to the farmlands.

Figure 9 shows what spatial extent this 600 metre width corridor would cover. There are many places

where this 600 metre corridor width standard is not met. The southern part of Rogue Park does not

even have park boundaries greater than 600 metres in width! The Toronto Zoo also infringes on this

600m corridor area. It is evident from the data the Rouge Park Toronto Region Biodiversity Blueprint for

Conservation Plan has collected that the Little Rouge Creek riparian vegetation corridor has not met the

conditions of the 600 metre wide corridor necessary to provide habitat for the number of area-sensitive

and interior forest species in Rouge Park.

6. NEXT STEPS

The map showing the Land Cover Types (Figure 6) can be used by individuals and conservation agencies

to create their own environmental management plan to further their environmental conservational

goals for Rouge Park in the Toronto Region. This map can tell people many things, depending on their

point of view: that the farmland in the Park is being conserved well for historical remembrance, or that

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Figure 9: A map of Rouge Park with a 600 metre riparian vegetation corridor buffer surrounding it,
showing that there are some areas that are not meeting the minimum 600 metre corridor standard
set out by the Ontario Government

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there is too much space dedicated to farmland, especially near Little Rouge Creek, and so some of this

farmland need to be converted back into riparian vegetation.

In the case of the minimum of 600 metres corridor width standard not being met at some areas of the

park, the Rouge Park Alliance members can hold a meeting or an information session with stakeholders

in trying to acquire some of the farmland back in order increase the corridor width to 600 metres or

more in the northern part of Rouge Park in Toronto. There are some places that can never realize, or at

least would be very difficult to implement, this 600 metre minimum corridor width: the Toronto Zoo and

the southern part of Rouge Park, where there is already heavy residential land use built.

In addition, after any implementation or change to a corridor, it should be monitored to assess whether

these changes are optimal or even sufficient for all species that inhabit Rouge Park. Different species

require different corridor widths.

The Rouge Park Toronto Region Biodiversity Blueprint for Conservation Plan set out to map and classify

the land cover in Rouge Park, and will contribute to the goals of any biodiversity conservation initiatives,

such as the Greenbelt Plan. The completion of this Plan also lays out any initiative to add more spatial

information to further enrich the data backbone in this Plan.

7. REFERENCES

The Green Lane. 2006. Waste Management: Beare Road Gas To Energy Project. Retrieved on Dec 4,

2007 from http://www.ec.gc.ca/wmd-dgd/default.asp?lang=En&n=3438B2E7-1

Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources. 1994. Rouge Park Management Plan. Aurora, Ontario: Ontario

Ministry of Natural Resources. 61pp.

Rouge Park Alliance. 2001. Rouge North Management Plan. Markham, Ontario. Xiv + 104pp

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Toronto Zoo. 2006. 2006 Operating Budget BAC Review. Retrieved on Dec 4, 2007 from

http://www.toronto.ca/budget2006/pdf/2006oppres_zoo.pdf

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