Skip to content
Join our Newsletter

fish study

Stream studies cast off this month Three creeks in the Whistler Valley will be intensely studied and monitored late this summer in an attempt to restore damaged fish habitat.

Stream studies cast off this month Three creeks in the Whistler Valley will be intensely studied and monitored late this summer in an attempt to restore damaged fish habitat. Crabapple Creek, The River of Golden Dreams and Millar Creek have been recommended as priority habitat study and restoration areas in a study completed last week by Fisheries Technician Lucyna Kresinska for the RMOW. Fieldwork and stream studies will kick off this month and the data will become part of the RMOW's resort monitoring program. According to Kim Needham, a municipal planner, the data and stream studies are an important step toward filling some of the gaps in the monitoring report presented at Whistler's first-ever Town Hall meeting last October. "We are starting to move into the full-on wildlife aspect of the environmental holes that I guess people saw in the first monitoring report," Needham says. "Fish habitat is going to be the first one and then we will move toward gathering some baseline data on wildlife habitat." Kresinska has also compiled an extensive bibliography of fishery habitat and water quality studies done in Whistler over the past 20 years. The extensive 46-page report summarizes 30 reports and studies which have been conducted on various bodies of water throughout the valley. In the introduction of the report Kresinska writes pressure "on the Whistler area fisheries is increasing due to rapid recreational growth. As land is cleared for golf courses and housing developments, valuable fish habitat is lost or degraded." In her recommendations for 1995 fieldwork Kresinska recommends that stream surveys of physical habitat, fish numbers, water quality and an invertebrate survey should be conducted on Millar Creek, the River of Golden Dreams and Crabapple Creek prior to the winter of 1995-96. Among the recommendations is one that suggests photographs and videotapes be taken of the streams, to be used as a baseline to measure the impact of future development.