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Some commercially- and culturally-important plants characteristic
of disturbance-maintained ecological communities in B.C. and
their uses are shown in the following table.
Click on the English name to see a photo of the plant species
and click on Map to see the species’ distribution map.
The photo and map will open in a new browser window. Click the
Close button at
the bottom of the image before clicking on another species or
map.
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English Name
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Scientific Name
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Uses
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Chocolate lily
Yellow bell
Map
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Fritillarea lanceolata
F. pudica
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Important food plants for Aboriginal Peoples.
Highly-prized garden ornamentals.
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Arrow-leafed balsam-root
Map
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Balsamorrhiza sagitatta
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Important food plant for Aboriginal Peoples.
Important deer, elk and bighorn sheep food.
Attractive ornamental for the dry garden.
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Bitter-root
Columbia bitter-root
Map
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Lewisia rediviva
L. columbiana
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Important food plant for Aboriginal Peoples.
Potential showy garden ornamentals.
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Desert parsley
Desert parsley
Desert parsley
Map
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Lomatium dissectum
L. nudicaule
L. macrocarpum
L. geyeri
L. triternatum
L. ambiguum
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Important food plants for Aboriginal Peoples (seeds and
roots).
Valuable ornamentals for rock gardens and xeroscaping.
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Common camas
Great camas
Map
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Camasia quamash
C. leichtinii
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Important food plants for Aboriginal Peoples.
Highly-prized garden ornamentals.
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Note: Some plant species have a limited occurrence
outside of the disturbance regime in which they generally occur.
This is because any mapping exercise is, by nature, a generalization.
Thus the conditions of a particular disturbance regime may exist
in small pockets in adjacent regimes (e.g. small areas of dry
disturbance-maintained communities may exist on dry southerly
aspects within the general area of moister disturbance-driven
communities).
All of these species occur on warm, dry, mineral soils. All
are light-demanding to mildly shade-tolerant. Regular fire appears
to significantly increase the abundance of several species,
such as balsam-root and desert parsley. Many species have significant
biomass stored in underground structures such as bulbs, rhyzomes
and fleshy tap-roots — a common characteristic of fire-adapted
plants which accounts for their importance to Aboriginal Peoples
as food plants.
Management strategies for these threatened ecosystems and the
NTFPs they support will focus on protection and rehabilitation
of the remaining intact ecological communities, strict regulation
of the type and intensity of NTFP harvest, control of human
disturbance and invasive exotic species, and selective re-introduction
of ground fire. Eco-cultural tourism and education are potentially
valuable tools for heightening public awareness of the status
and values of these threatened ecosystems and as a potential
fund-raising source for ecosystem protection and restoration.
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