British Columbia’s agricultural land reserve has been honoured as one of the best in the world, however estimates of how much land the ALR covers are out of date and inaccurate. Our team’s goal was to map the ALR of the Peace River census division to see how much of the land is being used for agriculture and how much is being used for other land uses or is threatened. This is important because it is critical for up to date information to be available when policy decisions are made. We found that 3% of land is physically unusable for agriculture due to rivers and lakes, however over 60% of soil is considered unusable as arable land. Furthermore, we mapped the extensive road network in the Peace River ALR, which severely reduces the space available for agriculture.
We organised our team by creating a schedule of when we would complete each stage of the project by, and outlined this in our project proposal. We then split the body of the report into biogeographical and social, assigning team members to complete further research and compile maps on these sections. We met up during lab times and one other time throughout the week to compile our data and review what each team member had completed. Furthermore, we used Google Docs to compile the written report, each taking responsibility for a particular section. My role in the project was to work with another team member to produce the social section of the project. I also was responsible for producing the executive summary and outlining any possible errors and uncertainties in the project.
This project has taught me a lot about not only the agricultural land reserve in British Columbia, but also how effective different methods of teamwork and project management are. Through GIS mapping, our report reveals that there are many oil and gas sites in the Peace River ALR, which is not permitted. However, through further research we found that the ALC allows oil and gas extraction to occur in the ALR because it is deemed vital for economic development.
A key GIS technique we used was the buffer tool, which allowed us to create a buffer 10 meters on either side of each road in the ALR. We used an array of analysis techniques such as clipping, converting feature to point, area calculations, selecting by attribute, merging layers and intersecting.
An issue we ran into was the restriction on some of the data sources which would have been helpful for our map, particularly surrounding oil data. If this data were made public, it would reduce the time taken to collect similar data from different sources and would allow for a different analysis on ALR management.
Please find attached a copy of ‘Mapping Peace River ALR’ by Kasper Richter, Elsha Noah, Amy Shaw and Hannah Griffiths. Finalwriteup.docx