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

Spatial and Quality Attributes of Culturally Important Plants

The Nak’azdli First Nation, located in BC’s northern Interior, northwest of Prince George, continues to rely on traditionally used forest plants for cultural, recreational, subsistence and economic activities.  Many members are observing, however, that it is becoming more difficult to find good quality plants for these purposes.  Harvesters cite several reasons for this, including increased forest disturbance due to logging, fires, the mountain pine beetle (MPB) infestation, range use, and human development (e.g. mines) in areas traditionally harvested by First Nations people.  In addition, the commercial harvest of non-timber forest products (NTFPs) has risen dramatically in the territory of the Nak’azdli Nation over the past several decades.  This mirrors the situation throughout the province (Forest Practices Board, 2004).  Alongside the growing awareness of the health and nutraceutical benefits of wild plants, there is increased interest in cultural revitalisation, and increased global market demand (Duschesne & Wetzel, 2003).  Combined, these pressures appear to be affecting the distribution, abundance and quality of understory plant species of importance to the Nak’azdli People.

Conserving and protecting the availability and accessibility of culturally important plant species is a management priority for the Nak’azdli.  Protocols for monitoring NTFPS are not yet well established (Ehlers, Berch, & MacKinnon, 2003), making it difficult to ensure that they persist on the landscape in both the abundance and the quality that people and wildlife need.  To create a baseline for monitoring, we must incorporate empirical methods with cultural knowledge to understand where, and how abundant, the ecosystems or habitats that support high quality culturally important plants are.  Research to adequately incorporate cultural-use species or NTFPs within existing vegetation inventories is still at the beginning stages.  Conventional inventories, such as the Vegetation Resource Inventory (VRI), or Terrestrial or Predictive Ecosystem Mapping (TEM or PEM) may record the presence of a species but say nothing of its quality or usability, which is crucial information to an NTFP harvester.  For example, a VRI may show that the shrub cover in an area is high, and the corresponding ecosystem map (i.e. TEM) may show that conditions in that area are appropriate to support a certain shrub community, such as blueberries.  By combining the two we can predict that blueberries may be present over a large part of this area.  Although this is a good starting point, it does little to indicate whether the high cover of blueberry converts to high quality blueberries that people would want to harvest.  An inventory must therefore include an assessment of plant quality in order to be useful to NTFP harvesters.  To integrate this aspect into a monitoring system we need:

• A clear understanding of which species are the most culturally important to the community;
• Knowledge of the historic distribution of these species and their habitats;
• Information on historic and current levels of use of these plants;
• Established criteria that incorporate the plant quality, as defined by community harvesters, (i.e. characteristics that make the plants desirable for traditional use); these must be understandable to other inventory users (e.g. ecologists) who may be unfamiliar with plant traditional uses; and,
• Vegetation inventory and monitoring methods that account for this quality criteria.

By establishing a traditional-use plant monitoring system in the context of the present-day issues of timber harvest, MPB, and global warming, it will be possible to look at species distribution, abundance and quality, and help to look at how we may monitor, and possibly enhance, the understory plants under modern day pressures.