Maplewood Flats on Burrard Inlet in North Vancouver, offers a good sample of a salt marsh, mud flats, and adjacent freshwater marsh in the heart of the urban landscape of Vancouver. The BC Assets and Land Corporation, acting under the Ministry of Finance and rapidly becoming the bad boys of Crown corporations, is now eyeing them with a different shade of green, the almighty greenback. This quasi-protection was enabled by the Green Belt Protection Fund Act of 1972 but, under Socred legislation of 1977, the lands are currently available for private sale. These green belt lands were purchased by the province in 1974 for their conservation value and many have been farmed specifically to enhance the WMAs in the region. The bad news for Boundary Bay is the recent announcement that BC now wants to sell Crown green belt and agricultural lands around Boundary Bay. Still, it provides winter refuge for more than 130 species of birds and supports millions of salmon and over 1.5 million migratory birds during peak times including the federal Alaksen National Wildlife Area and Reifel Migratory Bird Sanctuary and the provincial Sturgeon Bank WMA and Boundary Bay WMA. Over 70% of its estuary, the largest on Canada's Pacific coast, has been diked, drained, and developed. The Fraser's delta extends from roughly Chilliwack downstream to the ocean.
They provide critical staging and nesting habitat for millions of migratory birds and water fowl, and their often sheltered, tidal waters provide safe places for juvenile and spawning fish and shellfish in this way, they are regarded as nursery grounds.Įstuaries of big sediment-laden rivers, like the Fraser, are major places of deposition where large areas of agricultural lands build up. cent to many estuaries filter out sediments, nutrients, and pollutants, and provide cleaner water for the benefit of both people and marine life.īecause of their richness, estuaries provide permanent and seasonal habitat for many types of plants, animals, and fish.Because of this, however, estuaries are frequently dredged, diked, drained, built-up, or otherwise altered, and their natural functions impaired.Įstuaries perform a number of important ecological functions and come in a number of habitat types: shallow open waters, freshwater and salt marshes, sandy beaches, mud and sand flats, rocky shores, oyster reefs, river deltas, tidal pools, sea grass and kelp beds, and wooded swamps. Just as nutrients flow downstream, so do river-borne pollutants.įrom humanity's beginnings, estuaries have been major centres of settlement, becoming economic, transportation, and cultural focal points for coastal communities. They are also among the most endangered and very often bear the brunt of human waste and contamination. In fact, estuaries are among the richest, most productive, and most diverse ecosystems on Earth. Nutrients in rivers flow downstream to mix with and feed near-shore marine organisms, and together these enrich the local environment. Like all transition ecosystems, estuaries are places of tremendous biological diversity.
It is the margin that often manifests society's paradoxical relationship with nature.Įstuaries are transition zones where fresh water mixes with salt water they occur where rivers meet the sea. Occurring at the interface of land and water–whether salty or fresh–it was at this margin where life first crawled rather than swam. Two ecosystem types are among Earth's most important and most abused: estuaries and wetlands. Life is at its most abundant where land and water meet, whether the water is salty or fresh.
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