On a scale of one to five, how thirsty is Vancouver Island? You can find the answer at the Province’s drought portal (droughtportal.gov.bc.ca) which tracks drought severity across BC. Currently, the rating for our half of the Island has climbed to Level 4: extremely dry conditions, where water supply isn’t enough to meet both our needs and the needs of the ecosystem.
We don’t need a website to tell us that. We’ve watched creeks shrink and wells drop all summer. But it’s helpful to see the Province’s data confirming what we’re seeing on the ground. It turns out this relationship can go both ways: the Province is very interested in collecting data – what we’re seeing on the ground – from stewardship groups like ours.
To make that easier, the Province recently rolled out a tool that allows stewardship groups to report “stream connectivity” ratings directly from the field. “Stream connectivity” sounds abstract until you’re standing in a creek bed watching it happen. A stream at full connectivity flows freely from headwater to estuary and is rated Category 4. In the early stages of drought there is minimal flow and there may be dry stretches. This is Category 3. As drought tightens its grip, that mostly continuous ribbon of water can break into a chain of isolated pools, Category 2, then, eventually, into a scatter of damp gravel with nothing moving at all. This is Category 1. Each break in the chain is a problem for the fish and bugs that depend on getting from one pool to the next, and it’s exactly the kind of boots-in-the-creek detail that satellite imagery and rain gauges can’t capture on their own.
BWS has 21 creeks under regular observation, stretching from Bowser to Royston. We are well positioned to help fill in that picture. There is just one hitch. The Province is asking stewards to use a dedicated phone app to upload observations and data. BWS already has an app, custom-built last year, that our samplers use every week to record water quality parameters. Asking our volunteers to juggle two apps in the field, one hand on a probe and the other on a phone, felt like a recipe for dropped data or dropped phones. We’re doing the sensible thing instead. We’re adding a connectivity rating field to our own app. Our samplers will keep doing exactly what they are doing already and behind the scenes we’ll package up the data, including the new connectivity rating, and send it to the Province’s Drought Portal.
It’s a win-win. The Province gets current and reliable data from our stretch of the Beaufort Range. We get the quiet satisfaction of knowing our data is doing double duty, informing decisions well beyond our own watershed.
That satisfaction, we’ve found, never gets old.