About Our Environment
In British Columbia, we live in one of the most varied environments in the world. This section of the website describes some of the natural wonders that we are blessed with:
- our remarkable landscape, with its snow-capped peaks and deep valleys
- our climate, which includes the hottest place in Canada, as well as some of the wettest places on the planet
- our vast forests, which drive so much of our economy
- our tens of thousands of lakes are the central focus of this website, and described in detail in their own section
- the remarkable animal life that lives in and around our forests and lakes
This remarkable environment provides rich habitat for abundant animals, birds and fish - not to mention us. But it was not so long ago that our landscape looked much, much different...
Millions of years ago much of the northwest coast of North America was formed through the special process of plate tectonics (you may remember that the earth's crust is made up of a number of plates that move around very slowly). Scientists believe that small island "arcs" (like chains of islands) moved north and east from the Pacific Ocean and collided with the west coast of the continent. Many of these arcs fused onto the coastline, making the mainland a little bit bigger each time.
As the plates were moving northeast and bumping into the North American continent, they caused the land to fold and buckle, creating mountains and valleys. Volcanoes were also bursting to the surface, flooding the landscape with lava. And all the while, the whole continent was moving north on the earth's surface. There were many times in the history of North America that glaciers covered the landscape. The powerful glaciers broke up rocks, eroded away mountains, shaped huge valleys, and formed new lakes and rivers. The last major ice age still covered much of our area just ten thousand years ago (just a blink of an eye in the life of our great planet!). Much of our province was covered over with ice more than a kilometer thick.
What you see today is the result of the sculpting of the ice as it ebbed and flowed across the land. The sheets of ice carve out huge valleys and basins that now contain the great rivers and lakes. Chunks of ice broke off the glaciers and melted to form small, round lakes. The ice sheets ground away at the mountains, breaking off rocks and depositing them in the river valleys. Massive piles of gravel and sand were left behind as the ice melted, forming gently rolling hills
.The Fraser River basin is a good example of how glaciers and plate tectonics shaped the British Columbia landscape. It is the largest watershed in the province - a great zig-zagging trench between the coast mountains and the Rockies. (A watershed is the area of land that feeds a stream - all water in a watershed drains into the same river.) The Fraser has been called the heart of British Columbia, and with good reason: most of the large cities and towns in the province, from Prince George to Kamloops to Vancouver are located here. The Fraser River starts near Mount Robson, crosses to the center of the province at Prince George, flows south all the way to Hope, where it turns again and flows into the Pacific Ocean at Vancouver. It is fed by other large rivers like the Nechako, the Quesnel, the Thompson, and the Chilcotin. Some of the largest lakes in the province drain into these rivers: Takla and Stuart, Francois, Quesnel, Shuswap and Harrison. This is an incredible amount of water!
For more information on our geography, please look at these resources:
- Map of British Columbia
- Map of the Fraser River Watershed.
- BC Ministry of Environment, Lands and Parks
British Columbia's climate is as varied as its landscape. In fact, the climate is varied because of the landscape. We have a little bit of everything here in British Columbia, all because of the way the land is shaped. Before reading any more, have look at this biogeoclimatic map. Read below for a detailed description of some of the climate zones shown on the map.
Coastal regions are generally very wet, and although they do not experience the chilly winters that most of Canada enjoys they do have a generous amount of rain throughout the year. This zone of the province is geographically defined by the Cascade or Coastal Mountains. Everything west of the Cascades is very, very wet. In fact, the city of Prince Rupert is actually one of the rainiest places in the world - at close to 100 inches per year or more, it is much wetter than Vancouver, even, or some of the rainiest tropical cities on Earth, like Columbo in Sri Lanka.
Everything east of the Cascades is much drier!
Food for Thought... Why is the coastal region so wet? What is it about the landscape that causes so much rain?
At the other extreme, British Columbia has one of the driest and hottest spots in Canada. The dry interior zone is not large, but it is very interesting - snaking up all the way from the Mojave Desert in California, it makes its way through Oregon and Washington and into the Okanagan and Thomson River Valleys in the southern part of British Columbia. Only a small part of this area, near Osooyoos, is true desert. But the rest of it is still very dry, with rainfall as low as just a few inches per year, and summer temperatures that can be more than 40 degrees Celsius! They even have tumbleweeds, cacti, and rattlesnakes - right here in Canada.
Food for Thought... Why is the Okanagan so dry? How do the mountains prevent so much rain from falling there?
Prince George is in the center of the largest climate zone in the province. In fact, the term “central interior” refers to an enormous area of subalpine forest in the center of the province (but also extending into the Kootenays). It is dominated by Engelmann spruce trees, which earns Prince George the title “Spruce Capital of the World.”
The only other large climatic zone in British Columbia is the huge northern alpine zone. Its climate is alpine not because it is in the mountains, but because it is so far north - you get the same climate wherever it is cold enough, either on the tops of mountains in the south, or virtually anywhere if you go far enough to the north.
There is a very small but interesting climate zone in the Southern Gulf Islands and around Victoria, with probably the widest range of plant and animal life in the Province, including the very striking arbutus trees, with their smooth red trunks, which grow nowhere else in Canada
For more information on our climate, please look at these resources:
British Columbia is famous for its forests, and, of course, our economy is fueled by the forestry industry. In fact, most of the northern communities would be much smaller, or they would not exist at all, if it were not for the forests. Although our relationship to the forests is very different than a bear’s, we depend on them just as much.
The northern forests are so large that they sometimes seem infinite - almost boring - from the ground. But from the air, one can see many changes and patterns, many of them related to the shape of the land.
For instance, in the North, water rarely lies very far below the surface. Wherever the land dips, small marshes and lakes form - and different species grow in and around them. At first glance, the black spruce often looks sick or even dead, but it is actually one of the only species of trees that can grow in the acidic muck of a marsh.
Another landscape variation in the forest is caused by avalanches. Since alder are the only kind of tree that can re-grow after being snapped off at the ground by a few hundred thousand tons of speeding snow, the sides of many BC mountains are striped with stands of alder.
Northern forests are primarily spruce forests: either the Englemann spruce at higher elevations, the white spruce at lower elevation, or hybrid spruce in between. Also common are pine and aspen, which grow after a fire, and fir trees which are found in the older parts of the forest.
Fire is what really sets British Columbia’s northern forests apart from other types of forest. In a jungle, or a coastal rainforest, fires are rare and they have trouble getting started. But in the North, conditions are perfect for giant summer burns. Even though the winters are cold, the summers can be quite hot, and the sun stays up for a long time every day - the further north you go, the longer it stays up - which dries the forests right up. Then, the dry forests are ignited by tens of thousands of lightning strikes during summer storms!
It sounds like catastrophe, but fire is all part of how these forests naturally work. A burned region will re-grow surprisingly quickly - fast enough to be burned and re-grow several hundred times since the last ice age! In fact, one of the major northern tree species, the lodgepole pine, is perfectly adapted to this “fire ecology.” The lodgepole pine has seed cones that are very tightly sealed. These little packages of seeds can only be opened by the intense heat of a fire. Once the fire has passed, the seeds have a perfect place to grow: in a nice pile of ashes (good fertilizer) with nothing left alive to compete for water and light. These trees literally can not reproduce without being burned to death first!
This website is mostly about fish and fish habitat, but fish are just one part of a much larger ecosystem. Here we will look at some of the other wildlife in British Columbia, especially in the north, and how they are affected by the climate and landscape.
The most important thing to understand is that most living things in British Columbia haven't been here for all that long. We are all recent residents, because the entire province was covered by ice until about 10,000 years ago. When the ice retreated, the land was still quite inhospitable: cold and rocky, the forests barely started. Only quite tough species could survive there and they were the only ones that moved in and dominated what few food sources there were.
In many ways, the climate in British Columbia is still inhospitable - when you compare it to a steaming jungle, that is! Winter is long and challenging for animals in most parts of British Columbia, including us humans. While the weather is cold here, animals either hibernate (like bears), migrate (birds) or steadily lose weight (wolves or caribou, for instance) in spite of continuous, clever and often desperate efforts to find food. Some species, like squirrels, do fairly well by hoarding food during the summer. Some of the bird species that do stay survive the cold by huddling together in groups at night. Mice, moles and vole do fairly well by living under the snow for the entire winter - even when it is -40°C above ground, a mouse’s house will rarely drop below freezing. Unfortunately, owls can hear and catch mice that are moving under as much as half a meter of snow...
So you see that the harsh climate has resulted in some interesting animal behaviours and traits.
Many of the species - plants and animals - that you see in British Columbia are not native, but were brought by European settlers trying to make the province look more like home. Some of these, like several species of trout, have become an important part of life here. Others, like the starling or Scottish broom (a weed, not an animal), have become annoying and dangerous to local species.