Ecologically & Biologically Significant Areas

Canada's Oceans Act authorizes Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO) to provide enhanced protection to areas of the oceans and coasts that are ecologically or biologically significant. This tool does not give the area any special legal status; instead it calls attention to an area that has particularly high ecological or biological significance, and provides guidance on the standard of management that is considered to be appropriate.

Identification of an area as significant indicates that if the area were disturbed or disrupted, the ecological consequences would be greater than an equal disturbance of most other areas. An EBSA identification framework has been developed by DFO and is now being applied to identify, assess and map EBSAs within Large Ocean Management Area (LOMA) ecosystems.

• Uniqueness
• Aggregation
• Fitness consequences
• Resilience
• Naturalness

Concluding that an area is not an EBSA does not mean the area is not important - all areas have some ecological function and are therefore important.

• need to incorporate traditional and local knowledge
• significant lack of scientific data
• significant seasonal and geographic bias in existing data
• bias towards knowledge of species that are important to communities for subsistence
• fishing and hunting

Workshops were held with the scientific and local communities to help identify potential EBSA candidates. The results of these workshops combined to form 21 candidate EBSAs. These EBSAs were then evaluated using the identification framework, and 20 EBSAs were produced.