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Abstract

Forest ecosystems are critical for global biodiversity and provide essential ecosystem services, yet they face unprecedented threats from human activities and climate change. In response, international conservation targets, such as the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework’s goal to protect 30% of terrestrial areas by 2030 (the “30x30” goal), emphasize the need to protect and restore areas of high ecological integrity – that exhibit natural levels of structure, function, and composition. However, consistently assessing ecological integrity across vast and diverse landscapes remains a significant challenge, necessitating scalable, data-driven approaches. Satellite remote sensing, through the use of Essential Biodiversity Variables, offers a powerful tool for monitoring forest condition, but robust frameworks are needed to convert this data into actionable conservation insights. This thesis first establishes that satellite-derived indicators of forest structure and function are complementary for monitoring biodiversity and ecological integrity, with structural attributes explaining only 15.7% of the variation in functional metrics across British Columbia, justifying their combined use. I also showed that British Columbia’s protected area network is biased towards high-elevation, low-productivity ecosystems and land covers, and that forest structure and function differ between protected and unprotected areas. Building on this, I developed and applied a novel framework to assess and map ecological integrity by establishing high-integrity reference states within protected areas and employing coarsened exact matching techniques to quantify ecological dissimilarity for every forest stand in the province, while accounting for protected area placement biases. The analysis reveals that 47.2% of British Columbia’s forests exhibit high combined structural and functional integrity, while 15.1% have low integrity. Results also demonstrate that high levels of cumulative and individual anthropogenic pressures, particularly forest harvesting and built infrastructure, significantly increase structural dissimilarity from reference conditions, indicating a reduction in ecological integrity. This research provides a transferable, spatially explicit framework for monitoring forest integrity, addressing a critical gap in conservation science. By identifying high-integrity forests for protection and degraded areas for restoration, these findings can guide strategic planning towards the 30x30 goal. This data-driven approach allows for a more nuanced evaluation than area-based targets, ensuring conservation efforts effectively sustain biodiversity and ecosystem services.