Estimated Read Time: 6 minutes
The Forest of the Roman Empire
Tucked into the shadow of Mount Robson is a forest so old, it’s been growing since the last stand of the Roman Empire.
Trees over a thousand years old, towering into the sky and disappearing into the mist, each dripping with moss and lichen.
It’s exactly how we picture the rainforest of Canada’s west coast. It’s also how we should picture the low-lying forests of the Robson Valley.
Wait, what? A rainforest in the Rocky Mountains?
It’s true.
A global anomaly with global importance, the Robson Valley is home to one of the only inland temperate rainforests on the planet.
Temperate rainforests, of course, are usually found in areas of, well, temperate climates – often coastal ecosystems. But in two remote parts of Russia and in select watersheds along the mountainous interior of British Columbia and the northern US states, rainforests have developed by combining moist Pacific air with the deep snowpack so common in the Rocky Mountains.
Which is to say, it’s a landscape that requires absolute perfect conditions to exist – like a massive, towering slab of rock known as Mount Robson.
As the tallest peak in the Canadian Rockies, it has the ability to literally change the weather around it and the result isn’t just the conditions to create an inland rainforest – but create the most significant stretch of inland rainforest in the northern hemisphere; the largest stretch of inland temperate rainforest in the world.
That means this Interior Cedar Hemlock eco-region doesn’t require fire to regenerate and is more immune to the challenges facing its sub-boreal forest neighbour. It’s a literal oasis in the Rockies – stretching from the shores of the Robson River westward along the Fraser past the town of McBride, BC.
That means this And all of this might be super interesting if you’re planning a career as a meteorologist or climatologist or even plan a foray into the deeply exciting world of botany. But here’s the thing: This little pocket of moist soil and big trees is really, really important and it might be one of the least celebrated, least understood super-ecosystems on the planet.
Let me explain.
Rainforest ecosystems, by their very nature, are our planet’s lungs. They purify our water, clean our air and give us oxygen. And often when we think about the lungs of our planet, we think about the rainforest of Brazil.
But with the world falling in love with Canada’s Great Bear Rainforest, what we’ve discovered is that our temperate rainforests are actually the planet’s most effective lungs. These forests store twice as much carbon as the most carbon-dense forests of the tropics.
And though you will get taller trees in the Great Bear Rainforest, the Rockies provide wind protection that allows for larger, older tree stands here – and age is what really counts in the carbon storage game.
So, this rainforest has offered a heck of a lot of get-out-of-jail-free cards for humans and our toys since the time many of these trees started growing.
Like when the Roman Empire was just beginning to teeter.
Some trees, scientists think, might be more than 2000 years old – as in they’ve been standing since we first started throwing AD after our dates…and maybe even when BC could be found in a calendar.
And here’s the thing: only 30% of the world’s temperate rainforests still stand and, in the Robson Valley, intact rainforest cover is down to just 5% of the forested landscape.
Background image courtesty of: “ROMAN EMPIRE, ANTONIUS PIUS 138-161 b” by woody1778a is licensed with CC BY-SA 2.0.
It’s for this reason that the remaining trees are of huge economic value – supply and demand economics! – and also why scientists are increasingly connecting climate and biodiversity to the role of primary forests (and the consequence of removing trees that will take hundreds of years to grow back to their current useful state to both the environment and the economy).
But let’s get into the choices we face another time, okay? For now, let’s bask in the wonder that’s the Robson Valley’s hidden global treasure.
And I do mean treasure.
In recent years, those wily botanists have been out bush whacking to learn more about this ecosystem. They discovered 2400 species they didn’t know existed here – including many no one knew existed…on the planet.
Now, we know diversity of life is more common in boreal ecosystems – it has more biomass, or life, per square centimetre than any other eco-region in the world. But that’s on average.
The one place that has even more life than the boreal? This inland rainforest.
Why?
This ecosystem is oroboreal: It combines the best of the boreal biome characteristics with the traditional make-up of a coastal ecosystem.
Or, in English, organisms that normally live near or in the ocean are found right here in the Robson Valley, 500 kilometres from tidewater, under the watchful eye of the Rocky Mountains and with the full suite of Rocky Mountain mammals.
In some ways, this rainforest is like biodiversity’s Noah’s Arc – and contributing to this melting pot of biodiversity is the Fraser River.
As you also know by now (Right! Right?!), the Fraser is a system like few others, because salmon migrate over a thousand kilometres inland from the ocean to spawn in this temperate rainforest.
And just like coastal ecosystems, salmon, bears and trees engage in a millennia-old dance that is the nutrient cycle – grizzlies consuming salmon and leaving the carcasses on the forest floor to rot and seep into the soil to feed the trees.
In fact, these grizzlies are believed to be the only Rocky Mountain bear population that thrives on salmon – and possibly the largest population to rely on the low-lying inland temperate rainforest.
And with those rich bear-deposited salmon nutrients and the moist climate, the trees can grow tall – like twenty-two Lebron James’ stacked on top of one another tall – and wide – like two and a half LeBron James splayed out and circling the trunk wide.
The bigger – and older – the trees, the better lungs they can be for our world. Their size also allows them to provide unique and important habitat.
Like, the
hollow inside
of a
tree trunk?
It’s so large a bear can den in it.
Like, the towering forest canopy? It creates the shade for very climate and light-sensitive plants to grow, like boxwood shrubs, which mammals such as the highly endangered mountain caribou depend on. And as we’ve seen, when the inland rainforest disappears, so too does the mountain caribou.
Like, the tree roots? They’re so big, they can help the trees stand for an additional century after dying, providing new foods critical to supporting other species we’re struggling to sustain, like bats.
America celebrates the redwoods and Canada has all but forgotten to look in its own backyard to see – and appreciate – what we can find here.
Like a lost rainforest of thousand-year-old western hemlock and western red cedars – now understood to be a keystone species in its own right – sustaining, across the larger Robson Valley ecosystem, 260 birds and 62 mammals – and more plants than a botanist can count – to create one of the most diverse and most unique ecosystems anywhere on Earth.
And it’s right here, just as it always has been. Just ask the Romans.
What do you think?
Wildlife in the Interior Temperate Rainforest
