Taking Nature's Pulse - Biodiversity BC

Executive SummaryBritish Columbia is a spectacular place, known worldwide for its natural beauty and diversity. The province’secosystems provide habitat for a vast array of plants and animals and have sustained humanpopulations for at least 10,000 years. Although we continue to derive huge benefits from these naturalsystems, their true value and significance is not fully understood. Nor do we fully understand the potentialthreats to the environment caused by our expanding human footprint.This report, Taking Nature’s Pulse: The Status of Biodiversity in British Columbia, is a comprehensive, sciencebasedassessment of the province’s natural environment. Its purpose is to assist British Columbians in makinginformed choices regarding biodiversity. The scope of the report is B.C.’s terrestrial and freshwater realms,including their overlap with the marine realm.Taking Nature’s Pulse was developed by Biodiversity BC, a partnership of government and non-governmentorganizations with a mandate to produce a biodiversity strategy for British Columbia. Scientists – both provincialand international – played a key role in shaping and building the report through the preparation of technicalbackground reports and peer reviews of the report as it was being drafted.The report has four main sections. Section 1 provides background on biodiversity, including its attributes,importance and history in B.C. Section 2 describes the current status of B.C.’s ecosystems, species and geneticdiversity, and key and special elements. Section 3 outlines the threats to biodiversity. Section 4 presents themajor findings of the assessment.Taking Nature’s Pulse does not assess existing conservation programs and policies in B.C. or compare approachestaken in B.C. with those in other jurisdictions. Nevertheless, there is a wide range of conservationIII