Burrard Inlet Environmental Indicators Report - the BIEAP and ...

Burrard Inlet Environmental Indicators Report February 2008
2. Parks and Protected Areas
Why look at parks and protected areas?
The parks and protected areas indicator helps
describe the overall health status of the Burrard Inlet
ecosystem. These areas include provincial, regional
and municipal parks, protected drinking water
watersheds and areas such as the Lower Seymour
Conservation Reserve. The parks and protected
areas in Burrard Inlet are managed to conserve fish
and wildlife habitat, and to preserve natural and built
environments for public use.
Parks allow a range of recreational activities,
Capilano Reservoir, Capilano River Regional Park
including medium and high impact activities such
as field sports, mountain biking and skiing, as well as lower impact hiking activities. Balanced
land use programming is important to ensure recreational activities do not have a negative effect
on habitat.
Current status: For the watershed as a whole, 66% of the land has some measure of protection,
and a further 15% is in high elevation areas outside of the Metro Vancouver classification system,
leaving 19% designated as residential and urban areas. Most of the protected land is in the
undeveloped portion of the watershed (only 3% is residential or urban). The amount of protected
land in the developable area is 41% and varies for individual catchments.
Using parks and protected areas as an indicator
Parks and protected areas fall into three management classes,
defined by Metro Vancouver, and Rockfish Conservation Areas,
defined by Fisheries and Oceans Canada. These categories are
described in Table 2-1, along with examples for each category.
The indicator was developed by calculating the proportion of land in
each management class for the four main catchments in Burrard
Inlet for both developable and undeveloped areas (Map 4). The
developable area (below the 320 m elevation to the west of Lynn
Creek in North Vancouver, and 200 m to the east of Lynn Creek)
includes suburban,
urban and some
protected areas.
The undeveloped
area at the higher
Black Bear
Protected areas conserve
or manage habitat
required for:
• endangered, threatened,
sensitive or vulnerable
species
• a critical life-cycle phase
of a species, e.g.,
spawning, rearing,
nesting, or winter feeding
• migration routes or other
movement corridors
• areas of very high
productivity or species
richness
• recreational uses
elevations includes land in Classes 1 through 3 and
small amounts of land used for park facilities and
forestry.
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