Project 5 was to create an Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) map of the Garibaldi at Squamish project area. It proposed year-round destination mountain resort on Brohm Ridge, 15 km north of Squamish on Highway 99. It is 80 km north of Vancouver and 45 km south of Whistler (Fig. 1). If the project is approved, it will include 124 ski trails and 23 lifts, plus resort accommodation and commercial developments.
Click here to see the map: Garibaldi Ski Resort EIA
The purpose of the project was to evaluate the best-suited locations for the potential ski resort. It was so assess the environmental factors that would limit building a resort in those locations. My role was a natural resource planner who was retained by the British Columbia Snowmobile Federation (BCSF). I was involved in creating a map of the environmental factors that need consideration in the potential project area to build the ski resort. I looked at fishery habitat, red-listed species, areas of old growth and ungulate habitat ranges that exist inside the project boundaries. My job was to show that building a ski resort in that region is ineffective and it threatens areas of important specie occupation. If the resort were to be built there the future biodiversity of the region would be at concern.
Simplified Steps taken to analyze the data:
- Acquired broad data from Data BC; Old Growth Management Areas and Ungulate Winter Range, Rivers, Roads, Terrestrial Ecosystems, DEM, Park Boundaries, 20m contours.
- Set project boundaries. For this project the project boundaries were already set out for us to work with.
- Clipped data into the same coordinates, so that the maps are aligned with each other
- Then looked for specific environmental factors that are relevant and in the boundaries of the project area. Such as the areas of conservation, habitats of red-listed species that need to protected. I extracted specific information from the open source data to get specifically what was needed. For example, to get the area of red-listed species that fall in the project area, I used the select by attribute function to pick out the specific species that were classifies as red-listed and fell in the boundaries and created a new layer for them.
- The ski resort needs to be at a specific elevation so we needed to pick out a DEM that was above 555m. To do this we had to reclassify the DEM to only include areas below 555m.
- Rivers had to have a buffer because they are fish bearing habitat areas. I separated the rives into river streams below 555 m and above 555 m. Buffer tool was used to achieve this.
- Finally I displayed the layers on a map of the project boundary.
Results:
47.31% of the project area falls into a protected region. This data is a sum of around 14.23% of the project area that falls into fish bearing habitat zones, around 24.83% in red-listed ecosystems, 6.76% old growth forest, around 7.88% is an ungulate habitat zones.
- The two greatest environmental concerns to project development are the destruction of old growth forest and fish habitat riparian management zones. The only way the concerns could be mitigated is by leaving those areas untouched. Fish habitat zones are could be protected by preventing any water pollution in the region and allowing unmanaged space in the buffer zones.
When working on environmental projects, if I ethically do not believe in the proposal of projects I believe that they should not be allowed to continue. I would agree with the role I took as a natural resource planner to oppose the construction of this ski resort.
Accomplishment Statement:
Acquired, Parsed, Mined and Represented data from DataBC to show the projects impact on protected regions of Squamish.