| Abstract/Description or Keywords |
The Christina Lake Watershed is located in south-central British Columbia within the Monashee Mountain Range of the Columbia Mountains physiographic province. Environmental health is the foundation of economic prosperity in the Boundary Region, and is of particular importance to the Christina Lake area. The long term stability of this environmentally based economy depends on maintaining and restoring the environmental health of the lake and surrounding watershed. All this said, with human settlement and higher tourism levels, community concerns have risen over the last two decades on issues such as, water quality, habitat degradation, protection of native fish stocks and wildlife stocks, lake access and capacity, and Eurasian watermilfoil and the impact that this species can have on recreational values. The citizens of this community want to maintain the quality of life, which originally attracted them to this area while realizing that the very environment they want to conserve and protect is the major economic force within this region. The overall mission of the Christina Lake Management Plan (CLMP) planning process and implementation strategy is to devise methods “to preserve and protect the quality and health of the Christina Lake Watershed”. This CLMP and accompanying Implementation Strategy Manual is intended to provide long-term direction to the Christina Lake Stewardship Society (CLSS) and Project Partners in the undertaking of projects to improve the quality of the watershed. Due to the magnitude of information presented within this planning document, watershed level and lake level characteristics have been divided into two sections as follows: • Section 5.0 “Watershed Characteristics” – deals with all aspects of the watershed including geology, hydrology, streams and fish species present within these systems, wildlife, and current land usage information (excluding lake level characteristics). • Section 7.0 “Christina Lake Characteristics” – deals with lake level characteristics such as morphometric data, water quality, and biological characteristics. For each management objective, a comprehensive list of potential actions was compiled. The advantages and disadvantages of each action were summarized and the CLMP Science Technical Committee and Community Advisory Committee reviewed and discussed the overall merits of each action. The Committee’s determined which actions were realistic and likely to be effective in the watershed. The Committee recommended which actions where to go forward in the plan and prioritized each action into short and long term implementation strategies. The recommended short-term actions were then incorporated into the companion document the “Implementation Strategy Manual”. The actions within the manual were placed under broad categories to reflect the type of work that the action would entail. For example: some actions have a public education component while another action is field research oriented. The actions set out in this manual will be undertaken in 2005 and 2006 and the initiation of further project developments will continue into the future as the plan and strategy evolves. The long term recommended actions will be reviewed for implementation potential on an annual basis by the CLMP Committee. It must be noted here that the phrase short term does not mean that the action will be short in duration. For an example one short-term action item for immediate implementation is to continue and expand the water quality monitoring program. To establish trends, comprehensive data sets must be established over a long duration of time. |
