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

Managing Saskatoon and other Traditionally Important Plants

This project is concerned with the management of plants that are of high importance to the Siska Band and other neighbouring Nlaka’pamux First Nations communities.  Wisdom from the Siska Elders suggests that the ecosystems in the Fraser Canyon near Lytton were frequently burnt by aboriginal land managers and that they had an open forest structure.  This aboriginal landscape provided abundant wild plant food and plants suitable for basketry.  Oral history interviews as part of this project have shown that the knowledge of these practices is still alive, but primarily in the form of awareness of the practices rather than ‘how to’ knowledge.  The lack of burning in the last 100 years has led to a situation of increasingly dense stands of conifers with a high risk of severe wildfire events. 

In the interests of enhancing these plant communities a number of significant knowledge gaps have been found:

• Little information on how to encourage the cultural plants and how they respond to disturbances
• The information is not synthesised in an accessible manner

These knowledge gaps will hopefully be closed through a logging/spacing experiment above Siska and through the writing of guidelines for plant management for Saskatoon, soopolallie, blackcap raspberry and beaked hazelnut.

This project seeks to re-build the Nlaka’pamux knowledge of burning in a way that is complimented by western science and the confounding new factors such as noxious weeds.  From the Siska perspective a key result of this work is to once again have productive stands of wild plants adjacent to the community, as well, the reduction of forest fuels is considered key.