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elatively uniform climate are called biogeoclimatic units, where climate refers to the
regional climate that influences ecosystems over an extended period of time. The BEC unit
can be expressed as statistics derived from normals of precipitation and temperature. 50 It
was a lack of climate stations capable of documenting the complexity of British Columbia’s
climate, as well as a need to have biologically relevant climate zonation for understanding
climatic
affects on vegetation and associated sites that drove the creation of the climate
component
of BEC. See Appendix 1 for a more detailed description of the BEC system.
General Projected Climate Changes
The climate of the Xeni Gwet’in Territory is projected to get warmer and drier and this is
reflected in the changes to the BEC subzones. Note the shift zones from Figure 9 to Figure
10. To generate Figure 10, best matches (drier, warmer BEC subzones) were determined for
each original BEC subzone based on the climate variables projected to 2050. Although the
BEC subzones can closely represent the changes in the climate variables, precipitation and
temperature, they do not represent how the forests might change by 2050. However, the
changes
to the BEC subzones described below can give some insight into what species
and/or ecosystems may be vulnerable as the climate changes.
Based on the team assessment, eventually the climate of the majority of the area will be
similar to what is now the Interior Douglas‐fir (IDF) zone, with some amounts of the Bunch
Grass (BG) zone and Ponderosa Pine (PP) zone in the warmest areas. This generally agrees
with a recent modeling project completed on the entire province by UBC (Figure 11). By
2050 the IDF (yellow), BG (red), and PP (orange) visibly expand in the Chilcotin area
(middle of the bottom third of the map).
Figure 9. BEC zones in the study area 51
Figure 10. Projected BEC subzones by 2050
50 Downloaded from http://www.for.gov.bc.ca/HRE/becweb/system/how/index.html).
51 % of hectares excluding Alpine Tundra zone
32