After setting our research questions and hypothesis, we started our research by looking into online information of how the whole story happened. We found many pieces of news articles that indicates that salmon is back in the city and saying that is a miracle but still an unstable one. Most of the new articles only introduces background facts and information to the public. However, we were still able to find a few key players in the restoration plans through those new reports. From a piece of news article called Watershed moment for Still Creek, given by Vancouver Courier in August 2016, we found that “Over the last decade, Carmen Rosen has watched the conversation move from disaster to miracle.” Therefore, at that stage, we thought Carmen Rosen could be the one that actually started the restoration plan. We saw Ms. Rosen as one of our potential interviewees. “Herb Hammond, an ecologist with the Silva Foundation and project lead, said that area was an old-growth forest 100 years ago, full of coniferous trees that slowly filtered the water down from the forest canopy.” (Vancouver Courier, 2016) A picture of Herb Hammond conducting field tests in the Still Creek Watershed was also displayed under the newspaper title. Therefore, we chose Mr. Hammond as another potential interviewee. Using the similar method, a report given by Water Bucket Organization named Still Creek – rebirth of an urban stream in Metro Vancouver (2012) led us to Mark Angelo, who is a Canadian river conservationist, chair of BC rivers day and world rivers day, inaugural chair of River Institute at British Columbia Institute of Technology.
There are a few non-governmental reports can be easily accessed online. One of them is a famous one named Still Creek Rehabilitation and Enhancement Study (2002) given by Evergreen, prepared for city of Vancouver Community Service Planning Department and City Plans. This is the most integrated NGO report we have ever found. It not only introduces background, land use, stream characteristics, water quality, ecological values, City of Vancouver policies, provincial government and federal government legislation but also education and community art which is rarely covered by other NGO reports. It is a long report, about 138 pages long, evaluates almost every aspects of Still Creek Restoration.
There are limitations we have strongly experienced when looking into governmental documents. Based on City of Vancouver Policy documents in appendix 3 in the Still Creek Rehabilitation and Enhancement Study (2002) we researched some of the policy documents. Not much are easy for us to access. Fortunately, one of our interviewee, Carmen Rosen, provided us a list of policies related to Still Creek specifically. The policy background list was completed by Branca Verde in 2015. She not only list all the policies related to Still Creek restoration plan, but also evaluated specific objective/target of each one and who/what/how was these. It helped us to understand better of what the government has done, how is the speed of the restoration process. In general, it helped us to form an idea of the timeline of the project.
As mentioned above, we understand that only grabbing information from the library or online is far from sufficient. Since the whole plan happened about 20 years ago and it is still effective now, not much valuable details can be reached by only researching in class so we chose interviews as a vital method to make our research complete. We filtered and contacted several potential interviewees based on research we mentioned above. Although we did not get all the responses, most of them replied and showed us they willingness to participate in our research. This also inspired and encouraged us a lot. We interviewed Carmen Rosen from Still Moon Community who talked to us about how she started rescuing the Ravine Park, which is along the Still Creek by creating the Mosaic Garden, and started the Latten Festival. Mark Angelo from BCIT River Institute and Herb Hammond from Silva Forest Foundation who both told us that they are still working with the project. Maurice Coulter-Boisvert from Fisheries and Ocean Canada who gave us basic information about Chum salmon. We also interviewed Dana MacDonald from Evergreen. It is more like oral history to us since the stories and details our interviewees shared with us have not been recorded anywhere else before we explored them. Limitation here is that those interviewees we talked to are still a small portion of all the people who were making efforts in the project. Government and First Nation voices are also missing here.
Archival research provides supports for our research. We went to Vancouver Archive to look for historical information and images, Xwi7xwa Library to do the First Nation research, UBC Geographical Information Center to see aerial images. We also used ESRI software to investigate the normalized difference vegetation index that shows whether the target area contains vegetation and how their health condition is. Limitations we experienced during archival research is that not all the documents there are available to access. This could provide bias in our research.