Ira Sutherland

I am interested in questions such as: how are ecosystem services are changing? What drives their changes? And how we can better address complex temporal processes of change in natural resource management? In my PhD I am compiling a spatial historical database of multiple ecosystem services, such as salmon, timber, agriculture, and carbon storage, and their drivers at the scale of all BC roughly 1920-present. I will analyze these data using time series models to understand their trends and sudden collapses; cluster analysis to identify their co-occurrence in space; and regression models to identify what drives their changes. My research approach leverages existing historical data (often from Government databases/archival records) and emerging methods in spatial data analysis with the aim to provide a quantitative spatial history of the province, focusing on critical ecosystem services, such as salmon, timber, agriculture, and carbon storage,
and their changes through time.