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

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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. Page | 16
Burrard Inlet Environmental Indicators Report February 2008 Map 4: Location of Management Area Classes and RCAs in the Burrard Inlet Modified from ESSA (2007) Page | 17
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