Great Bear Rainforest
The Great Bear Rainforest (also known as the Central and North Coast forest) is a temperate rain forest on the Pacific coast of British Columbia, Canada. Originally a name coined by environmental groups in the mid-1990s, it is a 6.4 million hectare area along British Columbia’s north and central coast. It is part of the larger Pacific temperate rainforest ecoregion, which is the largest coastal temperate rainforest in the world.
The Great Bear Rainforest was officially recognized by the Government of British Columbia in February 2016, when it announced an agreement to permanently protect 85% of the old-growth forested area from industrial logging. The forest was admitted to the Queen's Commonwealth Canopy in September of the same year.
The size of the Great Bear Rainforest, also called the North and Central Coast land use planning area or the Central and North Coast LRMP area, is roughly 32,000 km2 (12,000 sq mi). As part of the 2006 North and Central Coast Land Use Decision three new land use zones were created: Protected Areas; Biodiversity, Mining, and Tourism Areas (BMTAs); and Ecosystem-based Management Operating Areas (EBMs). As of 2009, approximately 16,000 km2 (6,200 sq mi) of the region has been designated as protected areas (in a form called conservancies), and 3,000 km2 (1,200 sq mi) as BMTAs. Commercial timber harvesting and commercial hydro-electric power projects are prohibited within BMTAs.
The Great Bear Rainforest extends from the Discovery Islands in the south to the BC-Alaska boundary in the north. It includes all offshore islands within this range except Vancouver Island and the archipelago of Haida Gwaii. Its northern end reaches up Portland Canal to the vicinity of Stewart. To the south it includes Prince Rupert, most of Douglas Channel, half of Hawkesbury Island, and part of Gardner Canal. Kitimat is outside the region, to the east. Farther south, the region includes all of the coast west and south of the Fiordland Conservancy, Kitlope Heritage Conservancy Protected Area, Tweedsmuir North and Tweedsmuir South Provincial Parks—which includes Dean Channel, Burke Channel, Rivers Inlet, and the communities of Bella Bella, Bella Coola, and Hagensborg. The southern end of the region includes Knight Inlet and Bute Inlet.
...
Wikipedia