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Stop #1 |
Ecology: An Ecological Journey
Through the
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"You just have to respect the animals, creation. They are part of life. They had energy inside them and they expressed the vitality to live. They tried to escape. Everything wants to live: whether a fish darts in the dark because you came around or you know, even the Arctic Poppies, they follow the sun to express their desire to live, and insects, they express their way to live by trying to get blood. That is how they express that they want to survive. You have to respect life." Fig. 1a Click on a brown circle on the map to see the information about that stop in the journey. |
"And you know those kinds of things, if we are thinking about all of creation and how we can keep everything healthy and the life cycle going, we got to think about everything. We have to think about how everything interrelates and even those butterflies, they have a right to go where they need to." Darius Kassi (in Sherry and the Vuntut Gwitchin First Nation 1999:294).
In this chapter you will take an ecological journey through Vuntut National Park and the Old Crow Flats Special Management Area (Figure 1.1a see above). Along the way, as Darius Kassi suggests in the above quotation, we will think about how everything we see interrelates. Ecology is, after all, the study of the relationships between living things and their environments. Our journey starts at the northwestern corner of the Park in the British Mountains, and heading south, follows Timber Creek to the Old Crow River and the Old Crow Flats. The journey continues along the Old Crow River, ending at the village of Old Crow. We will look at different topics relating to Ecology at each of the ten stops along the way.
Vuntut National Park provides a unique opportunity for the study of ecology, and ecology provides a framework for the study of this national park. Ecosystem is the term used to describe the complex systems of non-living factors (air, soil, water) and living things that form the basic units of nature. Thus there are marine, freshwater, or terrestrial (land) ecosystems. Vuntut National Park and its neighbour to the north, Ivvavik National Park, are unique among Canada's national parks in that they have both arctic and sub-arctic ecosystems. Ecology includes the study of the structure of ecosystems and how they work, the study of populations within ecosystems, including topics like predation and competition, and the study of the adaptations of living things to the conditions within an ecosystem.
This chapter captures the highlights and special features of the area, and focuses on inter-relationships, especially those involving humans. Of special concern are human activities that may have negative impacts on the ecosystems.
This chapter is also an introduction to the complexity of the natural interactions that take place in the northern Yukon and in particular, within Vuntut National Park and the Old Crow Flats Special Management Area. It is difficult to separate out the components of the science of ecology, which by definition should treat all things together. For example, in discussing the distribution of plants and animals, all of the many factors which result in the presence of a particular species have to be singled out. These factors may include the underlying bedrock, landscape, soils, snowcover, moisture, disturbance such as winter ice scouring or summer ground ice slumping, the depositing of materials by the wind and more. Also to be considered are all the climatic factors; temperature, length of the thaw season, rain and snowfall, and hours of sunshine. All these factors and others combine to determine where a particular species occurs. The relationship between the people, the wildlife, and the land over the years is another important aspect of ecological knowledge. Ecology is the integrator of these complexities, but to understand them each has to be considered separately. Thus this chapter introduces many subjects treated in more detail in the other twelve that make up this Resource Description and Analysis.
