Research Document - 2004/009

State of Knowledge of Marine Habitats of the Northern B.C. Coast in Oil and Gas Lease Areas

By Jamieson, G.S., Davies, H.

Abstract

This Working Paper is part of a series of papers (Crawford et al. 2002a, Cretney et al. 2002 a,b,c) addressing marine issues within the Queen Charlotte oil and gas assessment area in British Columbia, Canada, and reviews the knowledge and knowledge gaps of marine habitats. We identify what is known about the principal marine habitats, biota, general trophic structure, and fisheries in the study area.

Habitat types within the study area vary in depth, substrate, relief, currents and exposure; range from nearshore to open ocean; and from sheltered inlets to high exposure sites. Habitat types that have been identified in the study area, and that could be potentially impacted by oil and gas development and associated accidents in the assessment area during development and exploitation, support a variety of potentially sensitive, valuable and complex communities including estuaries and salt marshes, intertidal mussel beds, kelp and eelgrass beds in the intertidal and shallow subtidal, and hexactinellid sponge and coral communities in deep water habitats.

We summarize biological community structure in the following habitats and species groupings:

• the intertidal (sheltered soft-substrate, sheltered hard-substrate, exposed soft-substrate and exposed hard-substrate),
• soft-bottom estuarine habitats,
• benthic subtidal habitats (sheltered, shallow (<30 m), sandy substrates; exposed, shallow (<30 m), rocky habitats; deep
  (30-100+ m), soft-bottom habitats; very deep (>100 m), soft-bottom troughs; deep (>20 m), rocky subtidal habitats; and very deep
  (>200 m), soft to mixed-substrate habitats along the Continental Slope),
• pelagic communities (phytoplankton, zooplankton, herring, salmon, and other pelagic fishes),
• marine mammals, and
• marine birds and shorebirds.

We briefly summarize species at risk and trophic structure analyses. We then provide an overview of the fisheries in the assessment area: First Nation and commercial (groundfish, other finfish and invertebrates), and conclude with a discussion on the relevance of both local ecological knowledge and of spatial information, and our knowledge on the general vulnerability of marine communities to oil.

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