Place your photos and videos in the service of conservation!
We need the best photos and video clips you've taken of the amazing native ecosystems, wildlife, plants, and landscapes (including their destruction too) across Canada.
We'll use your photos and videos to massively scale-up public awareness via social media and the news media on the magnificence of and threats to Canadian ecosystems.
We also plan to edit many of the best video clips together to create small documentaries on Canada's endangered ecosystems and natural areas!
Your photos and videos will reach thousands and potentially millions of people across Canada and the world if we use them - and they will be foundational to help protect endangered ecosystems and species like those you've captured with your cameras. Photo and video credit will be given if requested.
These awareness campaigns will be directly used to boost our efforts to greatly expand the protected areas system across Canada, which must include ecosystem-based targets (ie. to ensure the protection of the ecosystems most at risk from industrial logging, agricultural conversion, urbanization, etc. - where establishing protected areas is the most difficult) given the time-constrained nature of the extinction and climate crises.
We are particularly interested in the following ecosystems (but all natural areas in Canada are great) and the associated wildlife and plants in them:
- Prairie grasslands and BC's interior grasslands and "pocket desert"
- Aspen parkland ecosystems, including foothills parkland in Alberta
- Montane ecosystems in Alberta
- Carolinian deciduous forests, meadows, wetlands, and rivers and lakes in southern Ontario
- Great Lakes-St. Lawrence mixed forests in southern Ontario and Quebec
- The Laurentian and Eastern Township mixed forests in Quebec, and the Gaspe Peninsula
- All Atlantic Acadian forests and coastal ecosystems.
- BC interior forests in the Ponderosa pine, Interior Douglas-fir, Interior Cedar Hemlock ("Inland Rainforest"), and Montane Spruce ecosystems.
- Coastal Douglas-fir ecosystems on eastern Vancouver Island and the Gulf Islands (including Garry oak and arbutus ecosystems)
- Coastal Western Hemlock or old-growth temperate rainforests, including BC coastal estuaries.
- Southern boreal forest ecosystems characterized by mixed deciduous/ coniferous stands, as well as aspen-dominated boreal ecosystems in Alberta
- Southern freshwater ecosystems - wetlands, rivers, lakes, extra kudos for underwater footage!!
- Marine ecosystems including intertidal zones - again extra kudos for underwater footage!!
As we are a new organization (we just turned 2 years old) with a very modest budget, we cannot pay for videos and photos, but we will give you credit if you specify. All photos and videos must be your own (or you must have legal rights to release them for others to use) and taken in Canada.
We also ask that you accurately identify the locations of all photos and videos (GPS coordinates are great too if possible), and to try your best to identify the key species in the photos or videos (but we will double-check and research all species-ID).
Note this is an ongoing endeavour so there is no deadline - however, as we plan to start work on some documentary videos as soon as possible, sending us your best video clips would be most needed ASAP!
Please email Richa or Celina at Info@EndangeredEcosystemsAlliance.org and send us your best photos and videos (via WeTransfer.com is best). We will send you a release form if there are any we would like to potentially use.
(ps. please curate and choose your best relevant videos and photos carefully as it takes time for us to download them and look at them - no blurry photos of your lawn or the neighbour's cat etc.)
Thank you so much for helping us with these very important conservation and "ecosystem literacy" projects!