Work conducted by a member of a local Conservation group, Conservation North and UNBC Researcher is being featured internationally.
Director of Conservation North, Michelle Connolly, and UNBC Researcher Dr.Darwyn Coxson helped a team of international scientists conduct an assessment of the status of the ecological conditions within BC’s Interior Welbelt (IWB) and Inland Temperate Rainforest (ITS).
Two of the areas that were studied are located southeast of Prince George in the Goat River and Dome Creek areas.
Their findings will be published in a special feature on Imperiled Ecosystems in the journal Land.
The project is part of a global set of case studies on Earth’s primary forests led by scientists at Griffith University which includes case studies in Canada, the USA, Russia, Europe, and the tropics.
Connolly is a Co-author of the study, she describes some of her findings as disturbing.
“The most surprising thing is that if we measure our local forest ecosystem against these international criteria, they come out as being really in trouble. I guess we’re used to thinking of places like the Amazon Rainforest as being in trouble ecologically but our study really shows that our local ITR, in particular, is in big trouble if we don’t do something about the rates of logging and road building,” she explained.
The study also determined that logging rates nearly doubled from 5.3% in the ’70s to 10.2% in the 2000s, and have risen more recently as wood demand pushes into upper elevation Spruce forests and pressure to log is mounting from biomass pellet manufacturing.
Additionally, findings predict that if logging rates continue at current levels, ecosystem collapse is imminent within 9 to 18 years for the ITR, considered one of the most imperiled temperate rainforests in the world.
International scientists taking part used a set of criteria developed by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUNC), for ranking the status of ecosystems based on their conditions over time.
According to Connelly, the study found that several IWB watersheds were listed as ‘Vulnerable’ and ‘Endangered’ based on loss of habitat for rare plant and animal species, including the Northern Goshawk, Southern Woodland Caribou, sensitive fish like Bull Trout, and old-growth Lichens.
“We wanted to take an objective perspective, we wanted to take an ecological approach to what’s happening in this area. We wanted to basically look at risk in this ecosystem. We wanted to take a step back and find what does the data say about what’s happening here and if we examine this really special place against the gold standard for assessing ecosystem risk, what would that say for the IWB and ITR,” Connolly said.
Connolly says her experience working alongside many notable international scientists was ‘pretty cool’.
“They have other parallel projects happening in other parts of the world and it’s kind of cool that our local ecosystem is at a profile that’s as high as some of these other studies and some of these other amazing forests that we think of like the Amazon Rainforest or Europe’s Primary forests,” she added.
Conservation North continues to call on the provincial government to take the necessary steps to protect Primary forests in BC, which includes following through with the recommendations made by the Old Growth Technical Advisory Panel in April of 2020.
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