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Whole area needs protection

Editor: I very much appreciate your coverage of my recent presentation on my conservation report on the Elphinstone park expansion proposal (“ELF report finds major biodiversity,” June 19).

Editor:

I very much appreciate your coverage of my recent presentation on my conservation report on the Elphinstone park expansion proposal (“ELF report finds major biodiversity,” June 19). I would like to clarify that the report recommends the entire 2,137ha proposal be protected as a Class A provincial park. What the reporter said about only 70 per cent of the proposal should be protected was likely my fault for not explaining things more clearly.

What I was referring to was that my analysis found that some 1,500ha of largely intact pristine forest still remains in the original Elphinstone area proposed for protection some 20 years ago, or some 70 per cent of the total area. Many of these original forests grew back since the 1860s burn and are now older forests some 155 years of age, in which there are many surviving old-growth vets including statuesque Douglas fir and western red cedar. Despite older and recent logging, these older forest types are still interconnected and have the very high biodiversity values that would be the integral ecological core of the 2,137ha proposed park.

The remainder, representing logged forests from recent clear-cut to 80-year-old second-growth, should be included in protection to provide buffers and be allowed to recover to older forests.

Continued logging of older forests such as Elphinstone will only continue to increase what biologists call “extinction debt” for future societies. There is really so little left of these older forests at lower to mid elevations on the Sunshine Coast that they literally go off the scale of ecological significance.

Wayne P. McCrory, RPBio., conservation biologist