Sustainability in Action: Moving Day for Plants
The sun blazed down on Cypress Provincial Park as members of the
Vancouver 2010 team and Cypress community partners worked to save
samples of 12 plant species from demolition on a hot day in early
July 2007. The locally significant plants were found growing in a
small wetland, the site for a future snow-making reservoir.
“It’s important to salvage any uncommon plants that have value to the public. If we just shrugged our shoulders then that would be a loss,” said Alex Wallace, member of the Friends of Cypress Provincial Park Society, a charitable organization dedicated to the protection of Cypress Park's environment.
Wallace said that the plants – including species such as the common butterwort, three-leafed goldthread and round-leaved sundew – are not rare, but are not usually found in environments such as the reservoir site.
The plants were discovered when an environmental assessment of the site was conducted. While not required to salvage the plants, Vancouver 2010, its partners and environmental consultants decided that saving them would benefit the park.
“Right from the beginning, we had a commitment to delivering great Games on a sustainability platform, and that includes being smart about preparing and staging the Games on as small an environmental footprint as possible,” said Ann Duffy, the program director of sustainability at Vancouver 2010. “When the local community said this was something it really cared about, we said, ‘Okay, we’ll address that’.”
An excavator was used to dig up large swaths of earth, but a number of plants in sensitive or hard-to-reach areas were moved by hand. Volunteers from Vancouver 2010 donned rubber boots and hard hats and spent the day, shin-deep, in muddy water, carefully loosening muddy plots of vegetation with gardening shovels.
After excavation, volunteers carefully moved the tiny plants to a moist new site bordering a stretch of the Howe Sound Crest Trail – a site chosen for its similarity to the original habitat.
The project is breaking ground in more ways than one. Little is known about relocating plants in a sub-alpine environment, so a portion of the plant samples were taken to a nursery for observation and backup transplanting if necessary.
VANOC’s environmental monitor, Alex Sartori, said that in addition to the day spent moving the plants, the project required a week of preparatory labour, and more than one month of planning. “Everyone involved – be it Cypress Bowl, Vancouver 2010 contractors or the Cypress community – has really come together to make this possible.”
“It’s important to salvage any uncommon plants that have value to the public. If we just shrugged our shoulders then that would be a loss,” said Alex Wallace, member of the Friends of Cypress Provincial Park Society, a charitable organization dedicated to the protection of Cypress Park's environment.
Wallace said that the plants – including species such as the common butterwort, three-leafed goldthread and round-leaved sundew – are not rare, but are not usually found in environments such as the reservoir site.
The plants were discovered when an environmental assessment of the site was conducted. While not required to salvage the plants, Vancouver 2010, its partners and environmental consultants decided that saving them would benefit the park.
“Right from the beginning, we had a commitment to delivering great Games on a sustainability platform, and that includes being smart about preparing and staging the Games on as small an environmental footprint as possible,” said Ann Duffy, the program director of sustainability at Vancouver 2010. “When the local community said this was something it really cared about, we said, ‘Okay, we’ll address that’.”
An excavator was used to dig up large swaths of earth, but a number of plants in sensitive or hard-to-reach areas were moved by hand. Volunteers from Vancouver 2010 donned rubber boots and hard hats and spent the day, shin-deep, in muddy water, carefully loosening muddy plots of vegetation with gardening shovels.
After excavation, volunteers carefully moved the tiny plants to a moist new site bordering a stretch of the Howe Sound Crest Trail – a site chosen for its similarity to the original habitat.
The project is breaking ground in more ways than one. Little is known about relocating plants in a sub-alpine environment, so a portion of the plant samples were taken to a nursery for observation and backup transplanting if necessary.
VANOC’s environmental monitor, Alex Sartori, said that in addition to the day spent moving the plants, the project required a week of preparatory labour, and more than one month of planning. “Everyone involved – be it Cypress Bowl, Vancouver 2010 contractors or the Cypress community – has really come together to make this possible.”
Print This Page
