SCIENCE
THE DRIP ZONE EFFECT The microscopic harbingers of Canada’s forgotten inland rainforest
words :: Andrew Findlay Botanist Trevor Goward has spent his career looking at tiny things: lichen. But sometimes bigger picture perspectives reveal things that would otherwise go unnoticed. “One of my few talents is being able to see patterns where other people don’t,” Goward explains one day over the phone from his home in the Clearwater Valley of British Columbia. Years ago, he stumbled across a species of lichen growing where it had no business being: on the branches of a western hemlock that is normally too acidic to support such a lichen. It piqued his scientific curiosity about the inner workings of the inland rainforest, a name Goward coined in the 1980s to draw conservation attention to the unique rainforests of BC’s interior. These forests once covered more
Casey Ogle in the old growth.
STEVE OGLE
than 160,000 square kilometres and stretched 500 kilometres from just south of Revelstoke north to Prince George. More than a quarter of this ecosystem has been clearcut logged and less than ten per cent has been protected. Some people refer to this area as Canada’s “forgotten rainforest.” The inland rainforest is one of the world’s most unique forest ecosystems. In the Incomappleux Valley, south of Revelstoke, thousand-year-old cedars soar among hemlocks above a forest floor carpeted with thick moss. Though it’s in the Columbia Mountains, it could just as easily be the Walbran Valley 650 kilometres away on the west side of Vancouver Island. Such damp, coastal conditions so deep in the interior are made possible by a fascinating interplay of topography and climate. Rainfall in places like Incomappleux fall below the threshold of annual precipitation that defines a rainforest,
