To determine how much of the Fairy Creek watershed is protected as an old growth management area, the overlap between the two areas would need to be calculated. To do this the Fairy Creek watershed and the fresh water tributaries needed to be digitized using QGIS. First, the Fairy Creek tributaries were created as a new scratch layer, where the stream system was traced from an OpenStreetMap topographic base map, by using the ‘add line feature’. A total of 46 different line features were used to digitize the Fairy Creek tributaries. Next, the Fairy Creek watershed was created as another new scratch layer, where the watershed boundary was traced around the ridge of the valley, by using the ‘add polygon feature’.
Finally, the location of the Fairy Creek blockade and the route from Port Renfrew were both digitized as new scratch layers, by using the ‘add point feature’ for the blockade and the ‘add line feature’ for the road. The locations for each of these features was referenced from a map shared by Will O’Connell, one of the blockade organizers.
Data layers for cut blocks, forest tenure and old growth management areas were allocated from the Government of British Columbia’s data catalogue and uploaded into QGIS. The cut block data layer was divided into four categories to represent logging per decade starting in 1980. These four decades are the only timeframes where logging is represented within the bounds of the map. In the layer styling panel, the symbol selection was set to ‘graduated’ as to represent the different decades with a colour gradient. The value was set as ‘harvest year’ to represent temporal change while the class was set to ‘4’ as to represent four timeframes. The decades of 1980-1990, 1990-2000, 2000-2010, 2010-2020 were manually entered as the values for each class. The forest tenure data layer was represented by only the most recent decade by using the same process done with the cut block layer, however this time the class was set to ‘1’ and the value was entered as 2010-2020.
To calculate what percentage of the Fairy Creek watershed is protected, the area where the OGMA data layer overlapped with the watershed layer needed to be defined. Using the geoprocessing clip tool, the OGMA layer was set as the input while the watershed layer was set as the overlay. This produced a unique polygon layer that represented the overlapping area. The total area in hectares was measured for both the watershed layer and the new clipped layer by using the ‘$area’ function in the field calculator. The two area values were then plugged into a ratio-to-percentage calculator to determine how much of the Fairy Creek watershed is currently protected from industrial logging.
Mapping Fairy Creek 