The Government of Nova Scotia plans to add 23 areas of Crown land to nine wilderness areas, and welcomes your comments before final decisions are made.

These wilderness area additions, with a total of 5,000 hectares (12,350 acres), were acquired in the past 4 years from individual landowners, forestry companies, and the Nature Conservancy of Canada.

The additions are located in Halifax, Guysborough, Queens, Shelburne, Yarmouth, Digby and Annapolis counties. Locations are illustrated on maps of western (PDF: 928k) and central (PDF: 1mb) Nova Scotia.

More detailed information on each addition is available here.

These 23 additions will help protect our wilderness areas and ensure better opportunities for public use and enjoyment. Many will eliminate land in-holdings, while others will add important adjacent lands and features. We will protect rare species, mature and old forests, numerous wetlands, 48 km of lake shore, and 14 km of river.

Adding these 23 areas of Crown land to the nine wilderness areas also moves us closer to our goal of legally protecting 12 per cent of Nova Scotia’s landmass by 2015. Once designated under the Wilderness Areas Protection Act, these additions will increase the amount of legally protected land in Nova Scotia from 8.6 to 8.7 per cent.

Information and maps for each proposed addition are available for viewing from this table.

Additional information on wilderness areas is available here.

Comments

The public consultation phase ended on June 24, 2011. Thank you for sharing your views.