Restoration for resilience
This week I’m attending a conference in the Lower Mainland hosted by Society for Ecological Restoration – Western Canada, in partnership with the joint Ecological Restoration program of British Columbia Institute of Technology and Simon Fraser University.
The conference is entitled “Restoration for Resilience” which not surprisingly is the overarching theme of a few other conferences happening this year.
In these climatically tumultuous times, resilience is a hot and challenging topic in scientific and social aspects of restoration and reclamation, resource management, and community planning.
While we are still recovering from the flooding and wildfire impacts from last year, there is already talk of flooding this spring in the Okanagan Valley if the snowpack continues increasing at its current rate.
So what does resilience mean? By definition, resilience is the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties.
Ecological resilience is the capacity of an to respond to a perturbation or by resisting damage and recovering quickly. Such perturbations and disturbances can include random natural events such as insect population explosions, and human influences such as, fracking for oil extraction and the introduction of non-native plant or animal species.
There is no question that some of our actions are increasingly causing in ecosystems, often to less desirable and degraded conditions.
What some may not have considered is the loss of an ecosystem’s ability to recover from a disturbance endangers the benefits that humans derive from that ecosystem, which may include food, clean water, recreational opportunities or general aesthetic appeal.
Heavy stuff for sure. But it’s a reminder that we can learn from our experiences and everyone can play a role when it comes to making our environments more resilient.
Invasive plant removal and replacement with native species whenever possible helps to create sites that will recover faster from disturbance.
We can also adopt best management practices that reduce soil disturbance and the opportunity for invasive plant establishment in the first place.
As a side note, I’ll be speaking at this conference on the prioritization process that we’ve developed in the Okanagan which considers what values are important on the land base, when we are deciding where we are treating invasive plants.
We were the first regional committee in B.C. to consider the layering of social values such as ungulate winter range, conservation lands, community watersheds, recreation values, spring range for livestock and other interests, to justify our decisions.
For further information on invasive species go to our website: www.oasiss.ca or contact the Program Coordinator for the Okanagan-Similkameen, Lisa Scott, at 250-404-0115.