Vernon
http://www.abnc.ca
Osoyoos
http://www.desert.org
The South Okanagan Valley is home to
one of North America’s most fragile and endangered ecosystems,
hosting one of the largest concentrations of species at risk
(over 100 rare plants and over 300 rare invertebrates) in
Canada and is of international importance.
Thirty percent of BC’s wildlife
species at risk are in the Southern Okanagan and Similkameen
valleys. Many of the animals exist nowhere else in Canada,
or nowhere else in the world. Animals such as the Tiger Salamander,
Sage Thrasher, Night Snake and Badger will soon face local
extirpation unless their habitat can be saved.
Salmon Arm
http://www.grebe.shuswap.net/naturalists.asp
Central Okanagan Naturalists
Club
http://conc.silk.net
There may be no other area in Canada
that supports such a diversity of species as the Okanagan.
The dry grasslands and open pine forests of the Okanagan serve
as a vital landscape corridor between the Columbia Basin and
the Grasslands of the Thompson and Nicola valleys. To the
north are vast boreal forests, to the south is the desert
of the Great Basin
The Okanagan Valley is a deep, glacially
scoured valley carved into the rounded uplands of the Thompson
Plateau on the west and the Okanagan Highlands on the east.
The Similkameen Valley is bounded on the west by the Okanagan
Range of the Cascade Mountains. Desert-like grasslands in
the valley bottom are bordered on one side by rich marshes
and moist cottonwood and birch woodlands, on the other by
towering cliffs and hillsides covered with ponderosa pine
forests. Forests change to Douglas-Fir, larch, lodgepole pine,
spruce and subalpine fir as you move up ultimately to alpine
tundra. Elevations range from 275 metres at Osoyoos Lake to
2304 metres at Mount Baldy. (BC Ministry of Environment, Lands
and Parks, 1998)
The Okanagan lies in the rainshadow of
the Cascade Range and has a dry, continental climate. The
valley bottom has a predominantly semiarid steppe climate.
At higher elevation, average temperatures drop and precipitation
increases, giving the surrounding hills a humid continental
climate. The Okanagan Valley’s long chain of large lakes
moderates the winter and summer climate.
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