Ronnie Drever, Bronwyn Rayfield and Negar Tafti shared information about Tomorrow’s Prairies project at the Canadian Forage and Grassland Association’s (CFGA) 16th Annual Conference: Greener Horizons: Technological Innovations in Forage and Grassland Management in November.

Nature United, a conservation organization based in Toronto and affiliated with the Nature Conservancy of Canada, is leading the Tomorrow’s Prairies project which is funded by the Nature Smart Climate Solutions Fund under Environment and Climate Change Canada.

Ronnie, a senior conservation scientist with Nature United, provided an overview of what the project team has accomplished in the first year of the project which is designed understand the baseline conditions of grasslands in Canada and to project future models for Canadian grasslands.

Over 39 researchers are working on the project using existing data and extrapolating new outputs from that data. They plan to look at grasslands and identify metrics for carbon and biodiversity using a socio-economic approach to landscape modeling in collaboration with the CFGA and the Grassland Learning and Knowledge Hub (GLKH). They will use this information to create lands models to simulate plausible future scenarios.

Five different working groups are focused on five main themes: grassland classification, carbon, biodiversity, socioeconomic drivers and landscape modeling.

“All of this work in terms of characterizing basic baseline conditions, indicators of carbon and biodiversity, goes into the cone of science, as I like to call it,” Ronnie said. “We’re going to develop a series of scenarios of change which look at plausible future or desired futures from 2025 to 2050. Then we’ll create a series of results including scientific publications, presentations to policy makers and a final report which summarizes the research results.”

One of the challenges faced by the team is that the term grassland has a wide range of meanings depending on the context.

“When somebody says grassland in one context, it may mean a different thing in a different context,” he explained. “We’re trying to understand that and compile all those data, understand the differences and similarities and create a sort of harmonized layer that we’ll use for landscape modeling."

The project focuses on native temperate grasslands which are found in five provinces: British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba and Ontario. The landscape modeling will focus on the prairie’s eco zone and then take a hard look at each of the five or seven eco regions which comprise each zone.

The project is now in the trial period and focusing on an area of about 1,500 square kilometres in southern Saskatchewan which includes Grasslands National Park.

“We chose this region specifically because, relatively speaking, it is an area of low dynamism in a very dynamic landscape,” he explained. “The idea is to take the learnings from the small pilot area and expand them to entire prairie eco zone.”

Carleton University’s Bronwyn Rayfield shared information on grassland classification work being led by Alison Long.

“The work acknowledges that there’s all these different spatial grassland data sets out there, and there is interest in understanding how they compare, where are they similar and where are they dissimilar and why,” she explained.

Over 20 data sets were identified including provincial, regional, national, trans-national and global. One of the approaches they plan to use to relate the data sets is to apply the Canadian National Vegetation Classification system, which provides a hierarchy of all the grassland types and sub-types allowing the team to map all the data sets they found into the classification framework.

“This will feed into the modeling work,” she explained. “That baseline map will be useful to the community working in other projects.”

Bronwyn next talked about her own work, landscape modelling. She is mapping how grassland is changing over time by land use, using existing data. The research looks at native and tame grassland, as well as two converted classifications: settlement and annual cropland. The modeling looks at the conversions found within the classifications.

Part of the project looks the future risk of grassland loss with a focus of several dimensions including biophysical suitability, features like slope and moisture; landscape context, the percentage of cropland versus unprotected grassland; and socio-economic factors such as land value and distance to roads.

“The approach is the spatial predictive model,” she explains. “You basically take a bunch of drivers that you think affect the probability of grassland conversion. You include some kind of historic pattern of conversion and you build a model. That allows you to predict the grassland conversion risk.”

The data is then used to produce a heat map of the grassland potentially at risk of loss. The project will run several potential scenarios: zero conversion, business as usual, rapid conversion and a restoration scenario. It will also look at the impact of these changes on biodiversity and changes to carbon stocks and the global climate-emission pathways.

Agricultural climate specialist with the Nature Conservancy, Negar Tafti spoke about the carbon and greenhouse gas modelling. After evaluating multiple models, the group decided to apply the DAYCENT Model for agro-ecosystems, which is already calibrated and validated for North American grasslands. It models the changes of organic carbon and how soil properties are impacting the changes.

Similar simulations were applied for nitrogen emissions as well.

Ronnie wrapped up the presentation focusing on the biodiversity and socio-economic indicators. The work is looking at special places and special species, such as grassland birds, and different aspects of grassland condition. The socio-economic indicators look at factors such as crop and cattle prices. The idea is to spatialize the data or tell stories about the data.

The final outputs will be available to the public and others who might be interested in using the information to make decisions about grasslands.

2025 conference recordings  
The CFGA’s 2025 conference took place Nov. 18 to 21 in Fredericton, New Brunswick, and was organized in partnership with the New Brunswick Soil and Crop Improvement Association (NBSCIA).

Online access to recordings of all the conference sessions will be available for purchase soon. For more information, email [email protected]. Note, the recordings will be available for free to those who registered for the 2025 conference.