[Carl Seiber] So, most people don’t come to this park and say, “where am I going to find the sand dunes?”
They say, “where am I going to find the beach?”
But, let’s say you are walking Wickaninnish Beach, you do find these sand dunes. Right?
Well, not necessarily because the sand dunes are a war between the sand and the forest.
Because the sand blows up in this area and says, “we claim this as sand”. But the forest says, “this area is claimed as forest”.
And they fight. Wind blows sand in and covers over the plants. Forest grows out, covers over, claims that area again.
And yet, we've stepped into this fight because a couple decades ago
all along the front edge of the dunes an invasive grass started growing.
It came from California, Oregon – places like that.
Places where people had said, “we don't want sand to move, it's messing up our roads and houses,
so we'll plant this grass that will do a great job of stopping the sand”.
Solved their problem but created problems elsewhere up and down the coast because the grass didn't stay put, it moved.
And now, it grows here and along comes the sand trying to get past the grass and it can't.
No fresh sand means the forest grows – nothing covers it.
So, areas that used to be sand dunes they’re now becoming all forest.
So, we've stepped in to restore these places to make the sand move again.
[Mike Collyer] People love to come here and play on the beaches and play in the ocean
and one of the special things about the beaches here is that we have these dunes in behind some of them.
Our dunes here are formed by sand that is stored offshore and that sand gets pushed up by the ocean onto the beach.
And, the wind, in the summertime when the sand dries out, blows the sand along the beach
and it blows it back into the forest and eventually it can create these dune environments.
[Ross Venessland] These ecosystems are very rare on the coast of BC. They total only about twenty five square kilometers.
So, all the species that reside in these areas are naturally pretty rare.
The ecosystem itself is used as wildlife corridors.
Traveling out in the bush there is pretty hard so the animals will use these areas for traveling from point A to point B.
There is lots of insects to eat for shorebirds and land birds.
And, on the margins you get plants like Kinnikinnick, which is also called bear berry,
so bears and other animals will be eating those berries as well.
[Mike Collyer] We have Parks because as a society we recognize that we want to maintain some of these natural
beautiful places and the species that live in them.
And, Parks Canada has established a system for assessing the health, or ecological integrity, of our Parks.
We use the information we gather through this to evaluate
what are the priority issues for Parks Canada to address across the country.
And that's how we decided that we should repair these dune habitats.
Based on an air-photo analysis we saw a decline in our main dune systems of about 28%
between the mid 70's and recently, about 2007.
So, if we didn't remove invasive grasses and do other activities to restore these systems
we would expect that loss of these habitats would continue.
In addition, some of the rare organisms that exist in these habitats would not have a home anymore.
The Pink Sandverbena, in particular, as of 2000 was thought to be extirpated from Canada.
So, we didn't think it was here anymore.
[Carl Seiber] And a species like Pink Sand-verbena, it's a nice, sort of, Canary in a coal mine.
You know, something's going wrong – we're losing a species. Why?
Well, we better look at the problem. We better look at the place. We better try and fix it.
[Mike Collyer] What we're trying to do here is restore these dunes to a naturally functioning state.
And how we define natural is by looking at range of information.
One of the things we do we incorporate Traditional Ecological Knowledge.
We interview First Nations peoples to try to understand
what their oral histories tell them about the condition of these habitats.
[Karen Haugen] Parks Canada being the largest federal body to manage land on behalf of the government of Canada,
it's really important to work with our Aboriginal partners across Canada.
They were the first stewards of the land of Canada.
So, it is bringing in the scientific component and bringing in the traditional land use component.
So, together we are able to be a stronger steward.
[Mike Collyer] So, the things we're doing to restore these dunes are removing the invasive grasses.
And we do that by pulling them by hand, or using shovels.
In some of the tougher areas we bring in some larger machinery - some excavators and backhoes.
[Debora Obrist - Volunteer] So, today we are pulling some invasive dune grasses
to allow some of the endangered and rare native species to have a chance to regrow.
[Mike Collyer] Another aspect of our work involves the enhancement of Pink Sandverbena.
[Kaylyn Kwasnecha] And those are propagated just in a simple sand matrix
and once they have propagated it takes a couple of weeks and then we transplant them into larger root trainers.
And from there, we eventually outplant them into the dunes
once they are more of a mature size and they are dropping seed.
[Mike Collyer] So the response to our restoration has been immediate.
We've seen the increase in sand movement through the dunes.
We've seen, from our aerial imagery, we can see that the dune has in some areas
blown back into the forest that was starting to grow over it.
And, we now have hundreds of plants occurring in our dune systems in the Park.
So, once we get through those intensive periods of restoration
we're going to have to continue to come back and ensure that those invasive grasses haven't invaded the area again.
And what we will continue to do is invite visitors and volunteers and students to come out and help us do that.
We have seen that people are really happy do this and are interested to be stewards of these special places.
For me it's about the fact that if you lose a species you'll never have a chance to see it.
People won't see it. It's gone.
And that for me would be a tragic thing especially when we can do something about it.
And what we know here is we can, and what we've seen here is we're doing it.