Water Stewardship Information Sources

Citation Epps, D and Phippen, BW. 2009. Water quality assessment and objectives for Tsulquate River Community Watershed: Technical report. BC Ministry of Environment.
Organization Ministry of Environment
URL http://www2.gov.bc.ca/assets/gov/environment/air-land-water/water/waterquality/waterqualityguidesobjs/west-coast/wqo_technical_-_tsulquate_final_july_2009.pdf
Abstract/Description or Keywords The Ministry of Environment is conducting a program to assess water quality in
designated community watersheds. Community watersheds are defined under the Forest
Practices Code Act of BC as “the drainage area above the downstream point of diversion
and which are licensed under the Water Act for waterworks purposes”. These watersheds
are generally small (<500 km2
) and the stream response times are short and opportunities
for dilution or settling are minimal. The purpose of this program is to accumulate the
baseline data necessary to assess water quality and to establish ambient water quality
objectives on an individual community watershed basis. Water quality objectives provide
policy direction for resource managers, serve as a guide for issuing permits, licences, and
orders by the Ministry of Environment, and establish benchmarks for assessing the
Ministry’s performance in protecting water quality.
There are over 60 community watersheds within the Vancouver Island Region of the
Ministry of Environment. Rather than developing water quality objectives for each of
the watersheds on an individual basis, an ecoregion approach has been implemented. The
ecoregion areas are based on the ecosections developed by Demarchi (1996). However,
for ease of communication with a wide range of stakeholders the term ecoregion has been
adopted by Vancouver Island MOE regional staff. Thus, Vancouver Island Region has
been split into eleven terrestrial ecoregions, based on similar climate, geology, soils,
hydrology etc. (see Figure 1).
Due to accessibility and holding times of samples only six ecoregions on Vancouver
Island are being considered at this time. Fundamental baseline water quality should be
similar in all streams and all lakes throughout each ecoregion. However, the underlying
physical, chemical and biological differences between streams and lakes must be
recognized. Representative lake and stream watersheds within each ecoregion are
selected (initially stream focused) and a three year monitoring program is implemented to
collect water quality and quantity data, as well as biological data. Standard base
monitoring programs have been established for use in streams and lakes, to maximize
data comparability between watersheds and among ecoregions, regardless of location. Watershed objectives will be developed for each of the representative lake and stream
watersheds based on this data, and these objectives will also be applied on an interim
basis to the remaining lake and stream watersheds within that ecoregion. Over time,
other priority watersheds within each ecoregion will be monitored for one year to verify
the validity of the objectives developed for each ecoregion and to determine whether the
objectives are being met for individual watersheds.
Information Type report
Regional Watershed Vancouver Island North
Sub-watershed if known Tsulquate
Aquifer #
Comments
Project status complete
Contact Name
Contact Email