LFS:UBC Farm Audio Tour Biodiversity

LISTEN

Hi, my name is Andrew Rushmere. I’m the UBC Farm academic coordinator and I want to tell you a bit about the biodiversity on the farm site. Since the year 2000, we have worked to steward and enhance the rich biodiversity that we inherited on this mixed farm-forest operation. If you’re standing in the forest, you’re surrounded by 90-year old second growth trees; a typical temperate coastal rainforest mix of western red cedar, douglas fir, and hemlock, with some big leaf maple, alder, and wildlife inhabited dead tree snags mixed in the overstory. The bulk of the shrubby understory is comprised of native ferns, salmon berries, huckleberries, salal, thimble berries, and trailing. The forest floor hosts an incalculable number of decaying plant materials, fungi, insects, invertebrates and other microbiotic life forms that continually renew a healthy humus layer.

On the other extreme, if you’re standing in the cultivated fields, you’ll be amongst over 250 varieties of annual and perennial vegetables, fruits, herbs, flowers, and soil building cover crops in the off-season. Between these two extremes, we are maintaining and enhancing diverse ecological niches including a large network of native hedgerow plantings, a wetland, several old grown-out forestry research plots, and a mix of edge-habitats where these semi-wild spaces and the cultivated field spaces meet.

All this flora provides a home for a rich array of fauna, from over 90 species of birds including bald eagles, hawks, owls, woodpeckers, and song birds, to coyotes, snakes, pacific tree frogs, salamanders, and other small critters, and select domesticated animals such as free-range chickens, honeybees, and heritage beef cattle.

This biological richness also supports hands-on research and learning opportunities for students and Faculty members from various disciplines, whether they study the beneficial interactions between wild and cultivated areas, sustainable forest management practices, carbon sequestration in forests and fields, ammonia oxidizing soil bacteria, wilderness creative writing, place-based education, or creating Communities of Practice in Ecosystem Health.

The interaction between all these ecological areas is perhaps the most interesting aspect of the onsite biodiversity. Beyond their unique intrinsic values, each different biodiversity zone supports the agricultural operations in important ways through providing ecological services such as wind breaks, water purification, erosion control, disease mitigation, wildlife corridors with food and shelter sources, and habitat for beneficial insects that eat crop pests, and beneficial wildlife such as coyotes, hawks, eagles, and owls that eat the field rodents that feast on our crops.

Make sure you take some time to explore all these areas and keep your senses alert for the sight of eagles overhead, the sound of coyotes calling in the distance, and the feel of being an intimate part of a dynamic web of life.