Michelle Gamage is a journalist and photographer based in Vancouver with an environmental beat. You can find her on Twitter @Michelle Gamage. SHARES Half the Fraser River’s juvenile Chinook salmon stay in the estuary for an average of six weeks when transitioning from fresh to salt water, but that habitat is fast shrinking.
Photo by Michael O. Snyder, courtesy of Raincoast Conservation Foundation.
The southern coastline of mainland British Columbia is a world of mud flats, tangles of reeds and boggy marsh that fills and empties with the tides. The silty, often goopy waters may, at first, seem a pale comparison to the dramatic coastline to the north, where crashing waves meet rocky shores and walls of ancient pines but there’s more to this marsh than meets the eye.
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As sea levels rise, building higher walls may not be the best way to protect property, infrastructure and ecosystems in southwestern B.C., according to the leader of a four-year project aimed at co-ordinating local adaptation efforts.
Low-lying wetlands, salt marshes and natural assets are not just valuable habitat for wildlife, they might also be potent tools to manage flooding as sea levels rise by up to one metre over the next 80 years, said Kees Lokman, director of the UBC Coastal Adaptation Lab.
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