Summary & Project Goal
British Columbia (BC) has 28 major mining sites located throughout the province, these are mostly metal and coal mines. Mining of both metals and coal has been linked to adverse environmental and health effects. This project analyzes BC mines in proximity to valued components including poor/marginal water quality sites, wildlife habitat areas and First Nations communities. Since water pollution impacts both the abiotic and biotic environment, further analysis was done to compare poor and marginal water quality sites and mining zones to BC wildlife habitat and First Nations communities to account for potential harm as a result of poor water quality and proximity to mines. This project determined that for the 28 mines, it could not be concluded that mine presence directly resulted in poor and marginal water quality levels. That said, a large presence of wildlife habitat was found within close proximity to mine locations as well as to sites of poor and marginal water quality. Upon analyzing First Nations communities, there were three significant sites that were found to be close to mines and to sites that received poor and marginal quality ratings. This investigation found that although mining causes environmental impacts, more research is required to determine their extent.
Maps created:
First_Nations_Communities_Proximity (1) Mine_River_Contamination mrc_wlidlife
This project was organized with the other group members creating the maps and flow charts necessary for the report and my role was to contribute to aiding in data collection for the creation of First Nations community map, writing sections in the report and the final editing of the final project report.
Throughout this project, I not only learned significantly about the topic we focused on but I also learned that there is a very large gap in work that still must be done to research the situation. The map that was the most interesting to me was the map that combined First Nations communities and water quality analysis/mine presence. This was very interesting because with the buffer distance used (25km) there were only 3 communities found that met that criteria but had it been greater, there were so many more communities that would have been included. This project was incredibly eye-opening because it showed so many flaws in the provincial system for water quality monitoring and it showed that a map can only be as good as the data used to create it and ultimately I believe that was the greatest flaw within the creation of all 3 maps. Upon analyzing the incredibly limited amount of water quality testing sites, it seems incredulous that there are so few. This exposes issues for either a lack of site testing or a lack of publically available data. Data that is accessible to the public increases the amount of transparency and accountability for the government. This was frequently a topic of discussion amongst the group as no one could really see how there were so little sites that had data available. Overall, this project showed the importance of publically available data and the necessity for this work to be continued to be done by the government.
This was a joint project with contributions by Claudia Uhlir and Madison Brown.
Developed the necessary knowledge to investigate public issues through the use of GIS technology that is able to identify problems and better advocate for their solution.