Photo courtesy of Miistakis Institute.

A woman in a coral windbreaker peeks through cattails on the periphery of a marsh, her rubber boots camouflaged by vegetation and mud as she strains, clipboard in hand, to detect signs of amphibian life. A frog hops into a beam of sunlight through the dense flora and she marks a tick on her clipboard. She takes a picture, records her observations, and continues strolling along the wetland.

The woman is one of 82 citizen scientists volunteering with Call of the Wetland, a Calgary-based project that measures amphibian activity in local wetlands to better understand urban ecosystems and, by extension, inform developers before they build on sensitive lands. The group will monitor 60 of Calgary’s 4,000 wetlands from April to August over the next three years.

The presence or absence of amphibians “can tell you a lot about the water quality and general health of the ecosystem,” says Lea Randall, a conservation research population ecologist with the Calgary Zoo.

“[They] are among the first species to disappear when ecosystems are unhealthy or fragmented and thus can be important first indicators that an ecosystem is losing biodiversity,” she says. Currently, there are six amphibian species in the Calgary area, three of which are labelled at-risk. The biggest threat to these species, and wetlands in general, is development.

Canada has a poor track-record of protecting or even documenting wetlands. Local governments long considered wetlands to be wastelands, and a number of them in southern Canada were drained or filled for agriculture or development. About 90 percent of pre-settlement wetlands have been lost in Calgary. Today, many wetlands, particularly small ones called ephemeral wetlands, are threatened by development simply because there’s no record of where they are.

“That’s a huge issue, because we have dry years where ephemeral wetlands don’t show up, and then if they’re not mapped, it’s awfully difficult when you’re making decisions about development,” says Tracy Lee, senior project manager at the Miistakis Institute, a natural resource and land management non-profit organization and a coordinator for Call of the Wetland.

The City of Calgary plans to use the citizen scientists’ database to inform where developments are permitted without destroying sensitive ecologies.

“I think Call of the Wetland will draw attention to [wetlands] as an important feature in the landscape, and will hopefully create a culture of caring about them,” says Lee. “If you have people that are knowledgeable and care about something, then it has a voice.”

Wal-Mart: paving paradise and putting up parking lots since 1962.

In Salmon Arm, B.C., there’s been a long-standing fight over plans to build an enormous shopping centre directly on the floodplain of the Salmon River. Last fall, the city voted not to allow mall developer SmartCentres to build big box stores on this ecologically sensitive tract of land. Well, now we receive a report that a few days ago, SmartCentres started building anyway.

Warren Bell writes:

In essence, a giant developer (SmartCentres, based in Vaughan, ON, if you want to look them up) wants to build a giant Walmart-anchored shopping centre on a giant parking lot planned for the middle of the floodplain of the Salmon River, which enters Shuswap Lake within the boundaries of Salmon Arm, and supplies most of the water to the Salmon Arm of Shuswap Lake (which has 4 arms, like a giant chromosome), from which the town draws most of its water. The floodplain/wetland complex filters and cleans the water. And yes, there are several species of salmon slowly returning to the Salmon River, after nearly 20 years of local volunteer restoration work.

Last fall, SmartCentres came at this project, and were defeated narrowly by a vote of City Council. Now they’re back with a vengeance. Two days ago [on Friday, September 4], without waiting for government approval, they began dumping fill all over the floodplain.

I’m president of a small group of local citizens, called WA:TER (Wetland Alliance: The Ecological Response) leading a resistance movement against this proposal — not against development, but against development there. We’re struggling along in more or less “David and Goliath” mode, and now have our backs to the wall, because the developer is moving ahead before Dept of Fisheries and Oceans has said they can.

You know the story: wreck the ecosystem, pay the fine (the “cost of doing business”), and carry on building.

Warren Bell
Past Founding President, Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment
President, WA:TER (Wetland Alliance: The Ecological Response)

If this story weren’t so sad, it would almost be funny—it features so many clichés of real-estate development hell: the Wal-Mart rolls into town, dumps landfill all over a fragile wetland, and paves the whole thing with a parking lot. The only thing they’re missing here is a moustache to twirl while cackling in the shadows.

I’ve got a call in with SmartCentres to confirm that construction has started. I’ll update this post with their response if and when I hear back.

[Original creative-commons photo by Jadel Menard]