Watershed Condition, 1995
Keywords: Land Use
(An excerpt from The Rain Forests of Home: An Atlas of People and Place.)
Top conservation priorities for the coastal temperate rain forest bioregion include the protection and stewardship of large contiguous blocks of undeveloped land and water. Watersheds form a logical unit of analysis to identify such priority areas: the flow of water through a drainage basin integrates distribution of fish populations, flows of energy, and movement of materials. The analysis illustrated by this map is based on a methodology developed by Keith Moore (1991) as part of an inventory of coastal watersheds in British Columbia.
The level of disturbance within the rain forest within primary coastal watersheds larger than 5,000 hectares is shown in relation to protected areas. Approximately 41 percent of the forested watersheds included in this analysis remain undeveloped. None of these largely pristine coastal temperate rain forest watersheds occurs outside of British Columbia and Alaska.
The analysis of watershed condition combined the human development layer with the boundaries of major watersheds within the region. Given the known area of coastal temperate rain forest in each watershed and the amount converted by human development within each, the portion affected by human activities was readily calculated as a percentage.
Highlights:
- Forty-one percent of the forested watersheds included in this analysis (343 of 827 watersheds) remain in a largely undeveloped condition, all of them in the more northern parts of the bioregion.
- From Vancouver Island north, a substantial number of the coastal temperate rain forest watersheds are smaller than 5,000 hectares in size, and therefore not included in this analysis.
Map based on technical analysis by Andrew P. Mitchell, Randall H. Hagenstein, Lisa J. Lackey, and Marko Z. Muellner.
Map by: Pacific GIS
Created: January 1, 1995
