The area I have selected for this project is my family’s property. It is located about 20 minutes northeast of Lumby, British Columbia, in the Okanagan Valley. The area itself is located on a south-facing slope and is located within the ICHxm1 (Shuswap Very Dry Mild Interior Cedar – Hemlock) BEC zone. Some of the vegetation species present within the area include paper birch, western red cedar, interior Douglas fir, Douglas maple, snowberry, beaked hazelnut, tall Oregon grape, and ocean spray.
I visited this site on February 4th, 2023. The weather was sunny, it was approximately 1°C. Over the past few years, my family and I have been working on clearing the understory including all small shrubs and dead trees in order to have a more fire-safe area. As of right now, there is an area of about 3.3 hectares in size that we have cleared and another 2.4 hectares that have been untouched. For this project, I want to compare these two areas and see what changes it has caused to the overall ecosystems in the area.
Three questions I could look into answering within this area are:
- How has the vegetation structure and coverage changed since the clearing, compared to how much cover would have naturally been there
- Has the diversity of wildlife species changed within the area we have cleared
- Are wildlife species using one area more than the other and why might they be
