Location
Agriculture Science Theater, Oregon State University
Start Date
26-6-2013 3:10 PM
End Date
26-6-2013 3:30 PM
Description
With an area of almost 1 million square kilometers (or 365,000 square miles), the Canadian province of British Columbia (BC) is larger than California, Oregon and Washington combined. BC has traditionally been a resource-based economy and the result of over 100 years of resource extraction and development is a massive legacy of roads (>550,000 km) on the landscape. Conservative estimates place the number of converted crossings on these roads at more than 430,000 -many of which represent a barrier to fish passage. As a result, improperly designed / installed / maintained closed-bottom culverts and the resultant isolation of thousands of kilometers of fish habitat are one of the greatest threats facing the significant number of native BC fish species which have a migratory component to their life cycle (anadramous and otherwise). Since 2007, a multi-agency Provincial / Federal Fish Passage Technical Working group has been working on this problem. The group has been systematically assessing and prioritizing culverts for remediation to ensure the greatest habitat returns given limited resources. This prioritization exercise is based primarily on fish values and the amount of potential habitat upstream of each culvert. This has been modeled using a Geographic Information System (GIS) and incorporates known fish observations, upstream length, channel gradient, and other natural barriers to fish passage. This presentation is an update to one given at the inaugural Engineering and Ecohydrology for Fish Passage conference in 2011. The BC Fish Passage Program has now carried out over 10,000 assessments and while this is a small percentage of the total number of crossings on the landscape, it does give us a reasonable sample size from which to draw some meaningful observations. This presentation will provide summary statistics from the data collected to date and highlight some interesting relationships between roads, streams and crossings which fail to pass fish.
Concurrent Sessions D: Fish Passage Around the World - II - Fish Passage-The Current State of Affairs in British Columbia
Agriculture Science Theater, Oregon State University
With an area of almost 1 million square kilometers (or 365,000 square miles), the Canadian province of British Columbia (BC) is larger than California, Oregon and Washington combined. BC has traditionally been a resource-based economy and the result of over 100 years of resource extraction and development is a massive legacy of roads (>550,000 km) on the landscape. Conservative estimates place the number of converted crossings on these roads at more than 430,000 -many of which represent a barrier to fish passage. As a result, improperly designed / installed / maintained closed-bottom culverts and the resultant isolation of thousands of kilometers of fish habitat are one of the greatest threats facing the significant number of native BC fish species which have a migratory component to their life cycle (anadramous and otherwise). Since 2007, a multi-agency Provincial / Federal Fish Passage Technical Working group has been working on this problem. The group has been systematically assessing and prioritizing culverts for remediation to ensure the greatest habitat returns given limited resources. This prioritization exercise is based primarily on fish values and the amount of potential habitat upstream of each culvert. This has been modeled using a Geographic Information System (GIS) and incorporates known fish observations, upstream length, channel gradient, and other natural barriers to fish passage. This presentation is an update to one given at the inaugural Engineering and Ecohydrology for Fish Passage conference in 2011. The BC Fish Passage Program has now carried out over 10,000 assessments and while this is a small percentage of the total number of crossings on the landscape, it does give us a reasonable sample size from which to draw some meaningful observations. This presentation will provide summary statistics from the data collected to date and highlight some interesting relationships between roads, streams and crossings which fail to pass fish.
Comments
Craig Mount is the Aquatic Habitat Geomorphologist with the British Columbia Ministry of Environment. He obtained his M.Sc. in Physical Geography from the University of Western Ontario in 1995. He has worked in the Environmental Management / Geoscience field in BC since that time with experience in both consulting and varying levels of government. Craig has sat on the Culvert Fish Passage Technical Working group since its inception in 2007 and provides spatial modeling and data management expertise in addition to his main role as fluvial geomorphologist