When working on environmental projects, you sometimes become involved in proposals that you do not ethically believe in. Do you personally think the project should be allowed to continue?
The proposed project was to have a year-round destination mountain resort on Brohm Ridge, 15 km north of Squamish on Highway 99. My involvement with this project was to take the idea of a new ski resort and map out the areas where it would be suitable to implement. There are various areas of protection that needed to be taken into consideration when mapping out the final result.
The steps that were taken to come up with the environmental impact assessment were:
• Collecting data on the project boundary that would contribute to the environmental impact assessment like data on: ungulate presence, old growth management areas, the project boundary itself, terrestrial ecosystem mapping, roads, rivers, 20m contours and elevation. Data obtained from DataBC and specific G:Drive files.
• When downloading data, make sure the area of interest is selected: 92G.
• Parsing Data – structuring and organizing the data to keep it organized. Creating a database to keep all the newly named files in so it can be used later when mapping.
• Adding all the new layers to the map.
• Filtering Data – Cleaning the attribute tables and clipping to the project boundary. Many of the data collected have not been pre-cleaned so you can either hide or delete the fields that you will not use for analysis. The clipping allows for the layers to be ‘clipped’ to the area of interest, which is the project boundary. The clipping was done for both raster and vector files.
• Data Mining – Analyzing the data to determine if there will be enough snow, access to roads etc.
• Creating a new polygon of the project area
• From the data, finding parts of the project boundary area that contain old growth forests, ungulates, red listed species and fish bearing streams (protected areas).
• Representing data through maps.
• Refining – improving basic representations to make it clear and more visually engaging
• Interacting – manipulating the data to control what features are visible. (ex. choosing what layers to show).
Our results from the data analysis were the following:
Question 1 Value: 29.92% of the project boundary is on the lower 555m vertical.
Question 2 value: 6.78% of the project boundary area contains old growth forests.
Question 3 value: 7.89% of the project boundary area contains two types of ungulates.
Question 4 value: 24.83% of the Red listed species are represented in the project boundary
Question 5 value: map showing the red listed area.
Question 6 value: 28.03% of the proposed project will fall within fish bearing streams.
Memo: Personally, in my opinion, I believe that the red listed species and the fish bearing streams are more vulnerable to risk if the project were to be implemented. They cover more of the project boundary than the old growth forest and ungulates and as a result will be more affected or have a higher chance of being affected. Ways to mitigate this problem is to construct a ski resort around the red listed species and fish bearing streams area. If hotels need to be made for the ski resort, having taller hotels is an option instead of shorter and wider hotels that take up more project boundary area.
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I believe that if there is an area of concern I have with a specific proposal I would definitely bring that up during the meetings and express the reasons why I find a certain area needs more attention. In this case I do not think the project should be continued because rising temperatures were not taking into consideration nor was the amount of precipitation. However, if the company believes otherwise I will know that I have done my duty on informing them of the potential risks of the proposal. In my proposal I found other ways to mitigate the project to benefit both sides by suggesting a ski resort be constructed around the red listed species.