Keifer Ecological Services

• Kinbasket Reservoir Revegetation Program
• Arrow Lakes Reservoir Revegetation Program
• Silviculture, Wildfire and Forest Stand Effects on Huckleberries
• Spalding’s Campion Inventory and Habitat Assessment
• MOE Elder Creek Prescribed Burn
• Spatial and Quality Attributes of Culturally Important Plants
• Rare Plant Propagation and Restoration, Waneta Expansion Project
• Whitebark and Limber Pine Restoration in BC
• Impact of Accelerated Timber Harvesting on NTFPs
• Aberfeldie Channel and Revegetation Program
• Effects of Mountain Pine Beetle on NTFRs
• Revegetation of Disturbed Wetlands in Westpath Expansion Area
• Managing Saskatoon and other Traditionally Important Plants
• Invasive Plant Inventories at Provincial Parks
• Profile of NTFRs in the Cascade Forest District
• Invasive Species Mitigation Practices after Forest Management Activities
• Ethnobotanical Inventory, Invermere
• Reconnaissance Level Wetland Testing on TaTa/Skookumchuck Range
• Revegetation Monitoring - Kootenay 230 kV System Transmission Line
• Cultural Plants of the Creston Wetlands
• Morels in the East Kootenay, BC

Ethnobotanical Inventory, Invermere

At the request of the Integrated Land Management Bureau, Keefer Ecological Services Ltd. submitted a proposal to conduct an ethnobotanical inventory on Crown owned portions of District Lot 4616. 

The two neighbouring First Nation communities local to this project - Akisq’nuk First Nation and Shuswap First Nation - are from two distinct cultural groups.  Respectively these are the Secwepemc Nation (SFN) and the Ktunaxa Nation (AFN).  Research by the author while employed by the Ktunaxa Nation Council suggests that these two First Nations use many of the same plant species in highly similar ways.  This knowledge is confirmed within the literature (Turner 1975; Turner 1979; Parish, Coupé et al. 1996; Turner 1997; Moerman 1998; Turner 1998; Keefer and McCoy 1999; Deur and Turner 2005; Shuswap Indian Band 2009).

Ethnobotany is most simply defined as the study of the relations between humans and plants.  It is a discipline that borrows from a number of other sciences including botany, ecology and anthropology.  Since the time of European contact in this region there has been a significant erosion of this type of knowledge amongst the First Nations through the vast changes that they have seen in the last 200 years (Deur and Turner 2005).  In an effort to keep this valuable knowledge living, there have been numerous efforts to record this knowledge with much of the best work in BC being led by Dr. Nancy Turner from the 1970’s to present.  This incredible body of plant knowledge is used for teaching, self study, cultural preservation and a host of other uses.  For the purposes of this project it is the plants of ethnobotanical significance to the Ktunaxa and Secwepemc First Nations that are being inventoried for on DL 4616.  Further, this ethnobotanical knowledge is being applied to scope possibilities for a future subdivision.

Given that both the Ktunaxa and Secwepemc ethnobotanical knowledge has been documented in past works, this study was designed to look for the presence or absence and relative abundance of culturally important plant species.  Regarding this data, the objective of the work was to look for culturally important plant species, assess their abundance and whether or not the proposed development may impact them.  A secondary goal of the study was to examine the possibility of assessing the property for areas of greater and lesser suitability for subdivision.  The final goal was to look at opportunities for interpretation of the ecosystem and its ethnobotanical values.

The Crown owned portions of District lot 4616 comprise of three pieces of land: the first is a small piece on the waterfront of Windermere lake Area One (0.73 ha); the second is a large piece on a glacial lake terrace called Area Two (55.62 ha), and; the third is a mid sized piece on a steep hillside called Area Three (7.87 ha). 

The District lot 4616 property lies entirely within the Interior Douglas Fir very dry cool biogeoclimatic (BEC) unit (IDFxk) (Government of BC 2006).  This BEC zone is characterised by hot, dry summers and cool dry winters with low snowfall.  This unit is very small, only being mapped from Canal Flats to Edgewater indicating that it is an ecosystem with unique attributes.  Much of this BEC unit has been impacted from urban development and agriculture.  Like other neighbouring BEC units in the Rocky Mountain Trench, this ecosystem was subject to frequent stand-maintaining fire events that created a savannah-like landscape (Bond, Krebs et al. 2006).  Such a fire regime would have encouraged many key plant species to First Nations plant gatherers as well as an abundance of bunchgrasses and shrub browse to feed native ungulates.  Plant species that would likely have been encouraged by this regime include: balsamroot (Balsamhoriza sagitatata), sagebrush mariposa lily (Calochortus macrocarpus), desert parslies (Lomatium spp.), Saskatoon (Amelanchier alnifolia), soopolallie (Shepherdia canadensis) and a wide number of other plant species (Mah 2000). 

Over the last 100 years there has been major landscape change in this area due to changes in aboriginal land use, logging, grazing, the construction of transportation infrastructure, fire suppression, the introduction of invasive plant species and more recently, with habitat fragmentation due to urban development pressure.  Some of these forces of change may be rectified using ecosystem restoration techniques while others such as urban development and invasive plants are more permanent.