Showing decadal effects of resource extraction with Google Earth Engine
At a conference last month, I was talking to a guy from Google. He’s been working on a project for the last couple of years that has just been released: Google Earth Engine, which is to be a global platform for detecting large scale changes in the earth over time. They’ve brought together a large number of satellite data sets going back for decades. They have a variety of sample Landsat time lapse images that show changes from 1984 to present, including urban sprawl, Amazon deforestation, glacier retreat, etc.
So I was talking to this person before I had looked much at Earth Engine, and I suggested that in BC we had a lot of deforestation and old growth logging. Now I have a lot of professional respect for this person as he started a big open source geospatial software project that I use nearly every day. It’s awesome, and he deserves a lot of credit for that. But he responded by saying something to the effect of, “well, we mostly use it to look at deforestation and problems in the developing world.” At that struck me as extremely arrogant. As if to say that our North American practices don’t have any negative effect on the environment, it’s just the lawless and misguided third world countries that are destroying the Earth.
Needless to say, I was “excited”? That’s not quite the word… “eager” to take a shot at using Earth Engine to explore some of the chages that have been forced on BC’s forests. I have seen my share of clearcuts and my share of ancient forest and feel like I have a better than most on-the-ground understanding of how askew is the balance between the two. Here is a brief selection of a few of the places that caught my eye.
Bear Mountain Resort
Why not start close to home and look at one of the biggest loss of forest and habitat fragmentation that Victoria has seen in the last 30 years. In the mid-80s, Mount Finlayson had a pretty sizable buffer of forest around it. It appears that one could hike from the mountain south all the way to the highway and east all the way to Millstream Road (a couple kilometers in either direction) without hitting much of an obstruction… maybe a single power line.
Sadly, with the “construction” of Bear Mountain (i.e. buldozing of forest and the invasion of fields of scotch broom), there is now essentially zero buffer between the mountain and suburbia. The only view from the summit now is that of poor planning and botched development. The developers lost like $30 million on the project and the community lost a lot more.
Nitnat Triangle and West Coast Trail
Having just been out to Carmanah-Walbran this weekend, I wanted to take a look at how that area fared of the last few decades. Carmanah was saved thanks to the work of activists in the late-80s. However, the unprotected areas west of the Nitnat Triangle and North of the coastal portion of Pacific Rim National Park (and the West Coast Trail), didn’t fare as well. The animation shows dozens of cut blocks emerge every year eventually fragmenting the area to the extent that you can distinguish the park boundaries from the Landsat imagry, which is pretty pathetic.
Jordan River Logging
I’m going to guess that much of the area around Jordan River here is actually second or third growth forest. It was already pretty fragmented by the mid-80s when the animation starts. But even still, I was suprised by just how much volume of logging there is in this area. It doesn’t look like there’s much that’s not under 50 year rotations.
For loss of native forest, it almost looks like there was formerly some contiguous forest in the area north of Loss Creek and south of where the Kludahk Trail and San Juan Ridge. I’m guessing that that south slope gets a lot of rain and sun, but unfortunately it looks like they’ve worked it hard in the last thirty years between roads W 100 and JR Main.
Also out on the coast, if you look at the entrance to Sombrio Beach and to the east of where Loss Creek exits into the Strait, you’ll see two pretty massive clear cuts open up between 1984 and 1988 on areas that appear to have been deep dark old growth. I wasn’t around here then, and don’t know what they were like, but the show the same color signature as the other (still remaining) old growth areas adjacent to them.
Kelowna Logging
Finally, this one isn’t on the island, and I don’t really know much about logging in BC interior, but this sequence struck me as being very stark. The cut blocks don’t grow back as well in the dry interior and 30 years after the first cuts, the blocks are barely back to light green shade. The land just looks totally scarred.
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