A major interest of mine has been learning about the hydrology of British Columbia and all of the understood factors in its health, so to speak.<p>It has become evident to me that coastal hydrology is particularly precarious. Like in a lot of Oregon and California, we’ve got a lot of rain-fed streams which see little to no meltwater past May or so. It’s all water held in the mountain forests slowly descending, combined with additional rainfall through summer. A lot of these dry up in mid summer (totally normal), so the species living in them have very brief spawning cycles or live in the creek beds while waiting for rain to return.<p>But what we’re seeing is that there’s less rainfall in many areas, modifications to forests on a massive scale has reduced rain retention while increasing flooding events during rainfall, and so on — the drying occurs faster than before in these systems, the more-frequent flooding damages them, and the impeded hydrological systems essentially threaten to remove viable habitats for countless coastal species.<p>At first I thought I was being a doomer. Surely I’m being too narrowly focused and there are good things happening as well. It doesn’t seem to be the case, though… We’ve kind of taken the coastal rain and its multitude of lush and vibrant end products for granted. It turns out these eco systems were already quite precarious, and even mild drying beyond the odd draught might connote catastrophe for species with serious cascading implications.<p>Removing so many salmon from the streams and rivers has clearly eroded coastal forest development and biomass density in a very severe way. That has been its own silent disaster. But if we continue harming coastal hydrology through climate change and massive ecological interference like forestry, I think we might see something much worse.<p>All that is to say that once you look at the fragility of some of these systems and their species, ecological collapse almost seems matter-of-fact. We might be taking a huge amount for granted and seriously overestimating the resilience of certain systems, and how their collapse might devastate the apparent resilience of other systems. We seem to be kicking out the legs of the table.