Interior Wetbelt

The inland temperate rainforests of the Cariboo Mountains and upper Fraser River valley are finally receiving the attention that they deserve from ecologists and conservationists. More than 500 km from the ocean, we find a unique inland version of the much better-known temperate rainforests of BC’s coast. Over the past decade, researchers from UNBC and the BC Ministry of Forests and Range have made important contributions to our understanding of these globally rare ecosystems. Visit the Northern Wetbelt website for a wealth of pictures and information on this special area.

Despite the lush vegetation and moist climate of the wetbelt forests, fire is still an important part of their disturbance regime. But this aspect of forest history can be difficult to study in forests dominated by western redcedar trees, which tend to be hollow in the old-growth stands of the wetbelt. You can’t count tree-rings if there aren’t any!

In the Morkill River valley, a tributary of the upper Fraser River, special geological conditions made it possible to reconstruct fire history by radiocarbon dating of charcoal buried in soils. Full details are given in a recent paper.

Old-growth western redcedar grove in the lower Morkill River valley. (Photo: Marten Geertsema)

Remnant terraces of highly erodible glaciolacustrine sediments, Morkill River valley. (Photo: Marten Geertsema)

After forest fires, landslides and reactivated gullying buried soils and charcoal at the toe of these scarps, creating a datable record of fire-related slope instability.

Chilcotin Grasslands

The dry grasslands near the confluence of the Chilcotin and Fraser Rivers are one of my favourite field trip areas.

To see some of the most interesting parts of this spectacular landscape, you need to get down on hands and knees, and even use a microscope! The thin living crust of lichen, cyanobacteria, and mosses has important roles in these bunchgrass ecosystems: fixing nitrogen, contributing organic matter, and stabilizing the erodible surface soil.