Dawson Trail Dispatch, written by Norm Gregoire, March 2025
Page 17 https://issuu.com/dispatch222/docs/dawson_trail_dispatch_march_2025
For those who have visited the tall-grass prairie or for those who are lucky enough to call it home, the tall-grass prairie has long been known as a remarkable place. This area is home to twenty-eight listed Species at Risk, including species that are found nowhere else in Canada. The tall-grass prairie is considered one of the most threatened ecosystems, and the Manitoba Tall Grass Prairie Preserve, and surrounding lands lay claim to some of the best blocks of intact tall-grass prairie worldwide. With such pedigree, it is no surprise that this incredible area has been proposed to be recognized with two Key Biodiversity Areas (KBA) sites: Stuartburn-Vita Tall Grass Prairie KBA and Tolstoi-Gardenton Tall Grass Prairie KBA.
The KBA project celebrates nature and hopes to help support good stewardship of lands and waters for future generations. KBAs are places that contain remarkable concentrations of rare or vulnerable plants, animals, and habitats. These sites are often already known to communities and experts, but by applying a global set of criteria to recognize the sites formally as KBAs, the sites will receive additional recognition as places that are especially important for sustaining species and ecosystems. Recognizing a site as a KBA is a celebration of the past caretaking and efforts of communities around a KBA.
KBAs are an internationally recognized tool for identifying places that are important for the survival of specific species and ecosystems, developed by many organizations under the coordination of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN). KBAs are an information tool to help recognize special places, biodiversity, and ongoing conservation and stewardship work. Recognizing a site as a KBA does not add any protections or management requirements to the site and does not affect how people can use or access the site.
To be identified as a KBA, a site needs to meet specific, quantitative criteria. Usually, this amounts to a site containing a disproportionately high percentage of the entire population of a species or extent of an ecosystem. In the case of Stuartburn-Vita Tall Grass Prairie KBA and Tolstoi-Gardenton Tall Grass Prairie KBA, these two sites hold the entire Canadian population of western prairie fringed orchid and eighty percent of all Poweshiek skipperling butterflies on the planet. These sites also hold the largest known populations of small white lady’s-slipper in Canada and are an important stronghold for many other rare and special species, such as two-flowered dwarf-dandelion, and Riddell’s goldenrod. The exceptional importance of these sites—in many ways on par with other recognized natural hot spots like Grasslands National Park or Wood Buffalo National Park—is something that only exists because of stewardship by landowners.
Before the information on these KBAs is made available on the KBA Canada website, we would like to present the information to the community and answer any questions on the KBA process and what this means. Zack Moore, Assessment and Technical Support Coordinator with Wildlife Conservation Society Canada, and Norm Gregoire, Community Liaison for Species at Risk with the RM of Stuartburn, will be presenting on the KBA identification to the RM of Stuartburn Council Meeting on March 18th at 7pm and will be available to answer questions after the presentation in the RM office. We will also be hosting an information booth to answer questions and chat more with interested people about the KBA identification on March 19, 8am-4pm, in the RM office.
For more information on these events or KBAs in general, please contact Norm at info@sharedlegacymb.ca.
