The Great Bear Rainforest

Originally covering 60 million acres, the once continuous coastal forest between Alaska and Northern California has been severely altered, such that no undisturbed watersheds remain in California, Oregon, or Washington. Although much of the coast of British Columbia has also been heavily impacted by clear cut logging, some of the last remaining large contiguous areas of intact, coastal temperate rainforest are found in British Columbia’s Great Bear Rainforest – a region that still contains a full assemblage of large carnivore species and prolific stocks of pacific salmon. Given the critical loss of populations, species, communities, habitats, and ecosystems worldwide, the value of the extant forests along this coast cannot be overstated, as these areas represent some of the last remaining examples of wild coastal temperate rainforest in the world.

With a small group of students, Round River began working on the British Columbia coast in 1993, in cooperation with the Big House Society of the Heiltsuk First Nation and the Raincoast Conservation Society. Then in 1995, Round River and Raincoast Conservation Society joined with Greenpeace, Forest Action Network, Rainforest Action Network, the Sierra Club of Canada, BC Chapter, and National Resource Defense Council, to initiate the Great Bear Rainforest campaign.

Round River provided conservation biology research and analysis to help guide conservation strategies on the British Columbia Coast. This included the development of a Conservation Area Design for the Central Coast, and subsequent development with partners of an Ecosystem Spatial Analysis for the Coastal Information Team. Together, these products served to form the scientific basis for negotiations over protected areas in the Great Bear.

The Great Bear Rainforest campaign (savethegreatbear.org) celebrated an important victory in early 2006 with an official announcement by the British Columbia government resulting in over 4.5 million protected acres and another 19 million under strict land management guidelines called ecosystem-based management. However, as impressive as this achievement was, it fell short of the protected acreage recommended by Round River’s own conservation area design. Therefore, the need to care for the conservation values outside these new protected areas under ecosystem-based management remains a top priority.

Round River continues its role to build the scientific capacity and expertise in partnership with the Rainforest Solutions Project and The Nature Conservancy to implement the negotiated ecosystem-based management.