Area of Natural and Scientific Interest

An Area of Natural and Scientific Interest (or ANSI) is an official designation by the provincial Government of Ontario in Canada applied to contiguous geographical regions within the province that have geological or ecological features which are significantly representative provincially or regionally. Three separate designations exist: Life Sciences (or Life Sciences ANSI, or ANSI-LS), a region exhibiting ecological features; Earth Sciences (or Earth Sciences ANSI, or ANSI-ES), a region exhibiting geological features; and Candidate, a region under consideration for such a designation. Some sites with this designation were assessed through the International Biological Program between 1964 and 1974.

Regions classified as Areas of Natural and Scientific Interest are subject to certain management constraints. Ultimately, land management and stewardship is a municipal responsibility, so that "decisions on the appropriate levels of protection and land uses are the responsibility of the local municipality". Each region is specified to be either regionally or provincially significant for its representative feature.

Famous quotes containing the words area, natural, scientific and/or interest:

    Whatever an artist’s personal feelings are, as soon as an artist fills a certain area on the canvas or circumscribes it, he becomes historical. He acts from or upon other artists.
    Willem De Kooning (b. 1904)

    A book should contain pure discoveries, glimpses of terra firma, though by shipwrecked mariners, and not the art of navigation by those who have never been out of sight of land. They must not yield wheat and potatoes, but must themselves be the unconstrained and natural harvest of their author’s lives.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

    I am not afraid of the priests in the long-run. Scientific method is the white ant which will slowly but surely destroy their fortifications. And the importance of scientific method in modern practical life—always growing and increasing—is the guarantee for the gradual emancipation of the ignorant upper and lower classes, the former of whom especially are the strength of the priests.
    Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)

    You do not mean by mystery what a Catholic does. You mean an interesting uncertainty: the uncertainty ceasing interest ceases also.... But a Catholic by mystery means an incomprehensible certainty: without certainty, without formulation there is no interest;... the clearer the formulation the greater the interest.
    Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889)