Covenant Monitoring Program Week Seven: Ayum Creek Regional Park, Highlands Estates and Stewart Mountain Road Estates

View of scenic Ayum Creek

This week TLC’s covenant monitoring team returned to finish our work at Ayum Creek Regional Park in Sooke. Volunteers and staff initiated photo-point monitoring at Ayum Creek this year, which will help visually map changes in the park vegetation over time. This small but biodiverse park is bisected by a fish-bearing stream which is cared for by the Pacific Salmon Foundation. The park is home to a salt-meadow ecosystem where volunteers identified several native plant species and an interesting parasite, saltmarsh dodder (Cuscuta salina) which looks like orange string. Volunteer Jeremy Chan removed all the invasive laurel-leaved daphne that we could see from the trails – the infestation is fairly recent judging from the small size and low number of the plants.

The team also continued our monitoring of the conservation covenants at two residential neighbourhoods in the Highlands District, adjoining Gowland Todd Provincial Park and Thetis Lake Regional Park. These housing developments have endeavored to protect sensitive Coastal Douglas fir ecosystems, and rocky outcrops and wetland depressions with rare native wildflowers, by creating conservation covenants on continuous areas of each large lot. TLC monitors these covenant areas to ensure their protection.

If you would like to support the TLC monitoring program that protects over 230 sites throughout BC with covenants, please donate today.