Species like this rare Northern Leopard frog, and others, will benefit from new Kootenay-wide conservation efforts under the name of the recently-announced

Kootenay Conservation Program, formerly the East Kootenay Conservation Program.

For several weeks in mid October, local media helped make this small, rare Northern Leopard frog a Prince. The coverage began with news stories announcing the creation of the Frog-Bear Conservation Area in Creston Valley adjacent to Duck Lake and the Creston Valley Wildlife Management Area. The media then assisted the Kootenay Conservation Program in announcing the formal launch of our services into the West Kootenay. And, it was an especially wonderful surprise to see KCP's story and the princely frog share the front page of Nelson's Express News Update with the Kootenay Community Bat Project, as bats were so captivating at our EastMeetsWest annual conference.  

Conservation Campaign Director, CPAWS Southern Alberta Chapter

The Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society is Canada's voice for the protection of wilderness and parks. The Conservation Campaign Director is a senior position in a busy organization with multiple ongoing campaigns, and applicants should demonstrate their experience in senior leadership roles and in conservation issues. The position location is Calgary with some travel in Southern Alberta. Application Deadline: Nov 2, 2012. Please send a curriculum vitae (with references) and a cover letter to Anne-Marie Syslak, executive director.

Senior Systems Ecologist (Terrestrial Ecosystems)

SSA Technologies Ltd (ESSA) is an employee-owned Canadian environmental consulting company with offices in British Columbia and Ontario. For 33 years, ESSA has been tackling, reducing and resolving complex natural resource and environmental management problems in over 40 countries around the world. ESSA is looking for a seasoned professional for this senior position to continue builsing ESSA's expertise in Terrestrial Ecology, including landscape analysis, terrestrial ecosystem modeling, forest health modeling, habitat modeling, and carbon accounting. The Senior Systems Ecologist (Terrestrial Ecosystems) position will be staffed out of either the Ottawa or Vancouver office. Closing date: November 6, 2012.

Columbia Basin Trust - Environmental Initiatives Program (EIP)

The Environmental Initiatives Program small grants stream (<$10,000) are accepted by the EIP Program throughout the year. Contact Rick Allen, Program Manager-Environment, before submitting a proposal.

November 6, 2012 - Cranbrook, BC

Natural Processes for Restoring Drastically Disturbed Sites is a one-day workshop organized by the Columbia Mountains Institute of Applied Ecology (CMI) that will explore how natural processes can be applied to the reclamation of roads, borrow pits, and other sites that humans have disturbed. Natural processes have been "reclaiming" natural disturbances since the beginnings of time; and it is clear that traditional reclamation programs are failing to generate the ecological goods and services that were lost during the disturbance of the site. Providing erosion control is a key element in the development of effective restoration programs. We will look at the processes of erosion and how natural systems solve erosion problems. Similarly, many disturbed sites lack nutrients for plant growth or the capacity to cycle the nutrients that are available. We will explore the natural processes that provide nutrients and nutrient cycling capacity to ecosystems and how these can be re-established on disturbed sites. In many cases the systems and processes that naturally reclaim disturbed sites can be established on anthropogenic disturbances easily and at a lower cost than using traditional reclamation techniques.

This workshop on natural processes precedes this important CMI conference...

November 7-8, 2012 - Cranbrook, BC

Resource Roads in British Columbia: Environmental challenges at the site level is a conference being organized by the Columbia Mountains Institute of Applied Ecology (CMI)  Within British Columbia, paved and unpaved road length increased by 82% between 1988 and 2005. In 2000, there were over 420 thousand road-stream crossings in BC; over the subsequent five years, road-stream crossings increased by about 13 thousand per year (BC Ministry of Environment 2007). Estimates of unpaved roads vary from 400,000 to 550,000 km across the province (BC Forest Practices Board 2005). Many more roads have been built since. The environmental effects of roads are diverse, and include impacts on aquatic and terrestrial wildlife and habitat, soils, and water. This conference will address both road impacts and management responses.

November 9, 2012 - Castlegar, BC

Join leaders in a Climate Action Exchange from 9:00am - 5:00pm, to celebrate success, discover new opportunities and explore best practices and tools. This FREE one-day event will be packed with information, ideas and discussion to help prepare the region for climate change impacts while reducing carbon emissions and energy use. Lunch and refreshments to be provided. Registration deadline: November 2, 2012.

Connecting People, Land and Community

How is it that those of us who care about people and those of us who care about the land have ended up divided from one another? 

Center for Whole Communities  in Fayston, Vermont, is helping answer this question. It is a land-based leadership development institute that fosters innovative and collaborative responses from different sectors of the environmental and social movements to address the complexity of today's challenges. Center for Whole Communities' retreats, workshops and resources are designed to build leadership, relationship-building, collaboration, and communication, and to powerfully rejuvenate people who are working on the front lines of environmental and social change. 

Center for Whole Communities leads Advanced Leadership Workshops, such as Power of Place, Power of Relationship, recently held on October 26-28, in New Denver for 20 citizen leaders from throughout the Slocan Valley. This workshop gave participants a better understand their divergent histories and motivations for being in the Slocan, and the experience of weaving those different stories together into a shared sense of purpose and destiny as connected communities commited to place.  

Connecting to western Alberta

The Miistakis Institute based at the University of Calgary, envisions a world where communities have genuine access to the science and research they need to make choices that promote healthy landscapes. They study the landscape, so they can help people conserve it. They also make innovative research accessible to communities and decision-makers. The communities they work span landowners to networks, and any level of government, visionary corporations, leading edge scientists, environmental NGO's - anyone in need of science-based support for practical, sustainable, resource management decision-making.

Miistakis Institute works on many different types of projects from Applied Conservation Research & Design to Mapping and Geospatial Analysis to Facilitation of Collaborative Initiatives. Miistakis is leading several projects relevant to the Kootenays, such as the Highway 3 Transportation Corridor Project, Roadwatch at Crowsnest Pass, and a newer project called Leave it to Beavers - demonstrating the value that beavers play in maintaining and improving watershed health by providing functioning wetlands which serve to hold high quality water in upper watershed areas for groundwater recharge and surface run-off. In a water-stressed landscape, such as southern Alberta, beavers could be used as an effective strategy to improve water quality and quantity. Beavers can be relocated to areas where they will provide natural engineering to improve water quantity and quality and provide a natural climate change adaptation strategy.