Crown of the Continent Ecosystem

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Satellite image of the core of the area with the two national parks

As Crown of the Continent Ecosystem (German Crown of the Continent ecosystem by) is a natural area in the eastern Rocky Mountains called. It is located in the Canadian provinces of Alberta and British Columbia and in the US state of Montana . The boundaries are the headwaters of the Elk River and the Highwood River in the north, the transition to the Great Plains in the east, the Blackfoot River in the south and the Salisch Mountains and the valleys of the Flathead and Kootenay Rivers in the west . It covers an area of ​​around 43,000 km², of which about 40% is in Canada and 60% in the United States.

The core of the area is formed by Glacier National Park (USA) and Waterton Lakes National Park (Canada), which together are also known as Waterton-Glacier International Peace Park . In addition, parts of the Flathead National Forests and the Lewis and Clark National Forests in Montana, as well as Akamina-Kishinena Provincial Park in British Columbia and parts of the Rocky Mountains Forest Reserve in Alberta belong to the area. Almost the entire natural area is publicly owned. In the core of the natural area lies the Triple Divide Peak , the mountain on whose flanks the catchment areas of the Atlantic Ocean cross the Missouri-Mississippi river system and the Gulf of Mexico , the Pacific Ocean via the Columbia River and the Arctic Ocean via the Saskatchewan River and the Hudson Bay touch. The name comes from an influential article by the natural scientist and conservationist George Bird Grinnell , who in 1901 named the area of ​​what would later become Glacier National Park, and he was committed to protecting it.

The region's ecosystems are largely unaffected by human interference. As far as is known, no animal or plant species have died out in the area since 1492, which is the reference point for European influences in America. The Crown of the Continent Ecosystem is part of the Yellowstone to Yukon initiative founded in 1993 , which creates a continuous corridor from the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem to Yellowstone National Park via the Crown-of-the-Continent area, the national parks in the center of the Canadian Rocky Mountains ( Banff National Park , Jasper National Park , Kootenay National Park , Yoho National Park ) to the plains of the Yukon River wants to put it under nature protection.

In the first years after the turn of the millennium, plans for large-scale open - cast pits to extract hard coal on the upper reaches of the Flathead River in British Columbia were protested by a broad coalition of nature conservation associations. In February 2010, the Canadian province of British Columbia and the US state of Montana decided to permanently exclude the entire cross-border catchment area of the Flathead River from the exploitation of storage facilities for energy production.

literature

  • Tony Prato, Dan Fagre (Eds.): Sustaining Rocky Mountain Landscapes - Science, Policy, and Management for the Crown of the Continent Ecosystem . Resources for the Future, Washington DC, 2007, ISBN 978-1-933115-45-0

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Ben Long: The Crown of the Continent Ecosystem . In: Tony Prato, Dan Fagre (eds.), P.17
  2. ↑ Ben Goldfarb: Safe Passage . Orion Magazine, December 2015
  3. ^ Government of British-Columbia - Media Room: BC, MONTANA PARTNER ON ENVIRONMENT, CLEAN ENERGY ( Memento of May 7, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) Memorandum, Map and Press release - Environmental Protection, Climate Action and Energy, February 18, 2010

Coordinates: 48 ° 58 ′  N , 114 ° 0 ′  W