Canada's national parks can do better at limiting landscape fragmentation, study suggests

According to a Concordia-led study, Canada's national parks may still be struggling to protect landscapes from fragmentation as effectively as intended. The paper is published in the journal Environmental Monitoring and Assessment .

The researchers examined whether Canada's national parks have been successful at preventing fragmentation of park landscapes by transportation infrastructure, agriculture and other barriers that restrict wildlife movement across those landscapes.

The study analyzed 43 national parks and national park reserves across Canada and compared them with nearby unprotected areas from the year they were designated protected areas to 2020. The researchers mapped roads, railways, built-up areas, industrial facilities, agricultural land, water bodies and other features using historical maps and digital geographic data sets. Then they compared changes inside parks with those in nearby control areas.

Using a metric called effective mesh size, the researchers estimated how easily animals can move through a landscape. Larger mesh sizes indicate more connected landscapes, while smaller ones indicate greater fragmentation.

About half of the parks and control areas experienced little change in mesh size over time, mostly in remote regions. However, fragmentation increased faster in roughly 35% of parks than in comparable unprotected areas, while only about 15% were fragmented more slowly than their control areas. This suggests that park protection has been only partly successful at preventing fragmentation.

On average, older parks with long histories of tourism and transportation infrastructure generally became more fragmented than nearby unprotected landscapes. Protection was most effective in the Taiga , the Prairies, Pacific Maritime (the region along the coast of British Columbia) and Arctic ecozones. In contrast, park protection was least successful in the Cordilleras (including the Rocky Mountains) and Hudson (the southern shoreline of Hudson Bay) ecozones.

Banff, Jasper, Yoho, Kootenay, Prince Albert and La Mauricie are examples of national parks where fragmentation has increased more substantially than in unprotected areas.

The team says the results indicate that landscape fragmentation should be monitored carefully to reveal trends over long periods and to assess the effects of Parks Canada's various management strategies.

More information

Clara E. Freeman-Cole et al, How effective have Canadian national parks been at preventing landscape fragmentation?, Environmental Monitoring and Assessment (2026). DOI: 10.1007/s10661-026-15395-x

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Canada's national parks can do better at limiting landscape fragmentation, study suggests (2026, June 18)

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