Posted by Jesikah Post, DataBC on behalf of Andy Teucher, Ministry of Environment
What is this?
Environmental Reporting BC recently published a new environmental indicator called “Protected Lands and Waters in B.C.“. The indicator shows how much land and water is protected in British Columbia, how it varies across the province, and changes over time.
A few highlights from the indicator analysis:
- Protected lands and waters cover 15.4% of B.C.’s land and 3.2% of B.C.’s marine areas.
- The amount of protected land and water is variable across the province’s Ecoregions and Biogeoclimatic Zones.
- The amount of protected land in B.C. has more than doubled since the early 1990’s.
Open Data, Open Code
As we have blogged about here before, Environmental Reporting BC is committed to open and transparent environmental reporting. Accordingly, the data resulting from the analysis for this indicator have been made available under the Open Government License – British Columbia in the BC Data Catalogue. There you will find various data summaries of protected lands and waters, broken down by type of designation, ecoregions, and biogeoclimatic zones. There are also links to the source datasets used in the analysis—many of which are also available in the BC Data Catalogue.
In addition to open data, Environmental Reporting BC also released the code we wrote to perform the analysis in the Provinces’ code-sharing GitHub space. The analysis code—written in the R programming language—is available under an Open Source license, and allows anyone to see the steps we took to perform the analysis, repeat them if they desire, or copy and modify it to suit their needs.
Environmental Reporting BC shares data & analysis code so others can replicate and evaluate our work, to foster collaboration, and to support other similar initiatives, programs, and partners.
If you have any questions about the data or analysis, or find a use for it for your own needs, we would love to hear from you. Please email me at email@example.com, connect with us on twitter, or leave a comment below.