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NATURE
· Vanishing Natural Habitat
FIRST PEOPLES
· First Nations in the City
HISTORY
· Seeking a New Home
This is a link to a map of the cities of British Columbia with an optional close-up map of Vancouver and Victoria.

FOCUS  Vancouver and Victoria
Vanishing Natural Habitat
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This is a photograph of the edge of the city of Vancouver, British Columbia, taken near English Bay.
Downtown Vancouver was once a towering forest of Douglas-firs that rose higher than most high-rise buildings. Richard Cannings.
Farmlands in the Fraser Valley are intensively cultivated, reducing edge habitats so valuable for wildlife. Douglas Leighton.
This is a photograph of a farm in the Fraser Valley, east of Vancouver British Columbia.
Major environmental change began soon after European and Asian settlement started in the lowlands; the settlers cleared lowland and riverside forests, and ploughed the rich bottomland and benchland soils. The Fraser River estuary and smaller estuaries on the east side of Vancouver Island were dyked and drained. In 1948 there were already 1.8 million hectares of farmland in the province; by 1971 the amount had grown to 2.4 million hectares, most of it adjacent to the cities that relied on the food produced.
Urban Greater Vancouver grew up along the Fraser River near its mouth. Robert Cannings.
This is an aerial photograph of Greater Vancouver, British Columbia, near the mouth of the Fraser River, mountains in the background.
And the changes continue. In the Lower Mainland, on eastern Vancouver Island and in the Okanagan Valley, urban and suburban sprawl is consuming both agricultural areas and the remnant natural ecosystems. In British Columbia as a whole, almost 600,000 hectares have been developed for urban and rural settlement and for transportation. The remaining farmland is also being more intensively worked – edge habitats are being converted into agricultural land with little or no regard for their value as wildlife habitat, and fertilizers (which result in rampant growth of algae in water habitats) and pesticides are being used to increase production.
Sardis, in the heart of the Fraser Valley. Suburbs encroach on natural habitats and farmland. Douglas Leighton.
This is a photograph of Sardis, in the Fraser Valley of British Columbia, with suburbs encroaching on natural habitats and farmland.
The problem of habitat loss is accentuated by the fact that most of the plant and animal species we share the province with also prefer or even require the disappearing natural ecosystems of British Columbia's valleys, which are benign, rich places, and where most urban development occurs. Fully half of the animal species on the provincial Red List – those that may be threatened or endangered – are confined to low elevations in or near cities and towns.
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