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, regionally, or locally. Some sites with this designation were assessed through the International Biological Program between 1964 and 1974. As of 2014, over 1000 sites covering 460,000 hectares (4,600 km2) have been designated in the province.
The Conservation Land Tax Incentive Program (CLTIP) is a program offered to landowners whose property includes ANSI land to voluntarily protect that land in exchange for a property tax reduction.
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, an area under consideration for such a designation. The latter are sites that the Ministry of Natural Resources has "identified and recommended for protection", but have not yet been formally confirmed, and were previously referred to as nominated ANSIs.These cannot be classified as provincially significant until they are confirmed. Provincially significant ANSIs are "the best representative sites that do not occur within national parks, provincial parks, or conservation reserves". These may also be nationally or internationally significant features.
An Earth Science area is one in which the representative feature was created by geologic processes and consists of the physical elements of a natural landscape, such as the bedrock, landforms, and fossils. These are identified by lithology, paleontology, and geomorphology, then classified "into geological themes" according to age, stratigraphy, topography, and other characteristics.
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