The Slocan Valley is fortunate to have Richard Johnson amongst its residents. Richard is a professional engineer involved with many projects and local conservation organizations including the Arrow Lakes Environmental Stewardship Society, Slocan Wetlands Assessment and Mapping Project (SWAMP), of which he was a cofounder, and Living Lakes Canada, among others.
Richard has many interests and is especially passionate about anything related to water. When he settled in the upper Slocan Valley with his wife, he originally taught sailing lessons on Slocan Lake, but this was eventually replaced with conducting water surveys, mapping wetlands, and monitoring aquifers.
The beginnings of SWAMP are a true testament to the power of community. As Richard explains it, many residents including members of the Slocan Lake Stewardship Society and the Slocan River Streamkeepers, had attended a Wetlands Institute workshop in 2013 run by the BC Wildlife Federation, where ten experts were invited to teach about various aspects of wetland ecology.
“SWAMP was an outgrowth of this field institute which included a Bioblitz of wetlands along Bonanza Creek. We all got together after the workshop in Sally Hammond’s kitchen, and we said, ‘let’s put what we just learned into practice.’ Jennifer Yeow came up with the acronym SWAMP, and we created this new organization. Margaret Hartley and Marcy Mahr did most of the coordination of it, Ryan Durand led the field work and mapping, and with these folks and too many other people to name, we made it all work. Over the course of three years, we mapped and classified about 120 wetlands in the Slocan Valley.”
Richard is past president of the Arrow Lakes Environmental Stewardship Society (ALESS), based in Nakusp. The Box Mountain water sampling project started organically, when residents of the Crescent Bay subdivision came to Richard asking how they could protect their water supplies, after hearing about a potential wildfire mitigation project on the slope of Box Mountain above their homes.
“Many people were living on surface water supply, which is very susceptible to disturbances. I recommended that they start sampling their wells and creating a database. Once a month for a year, they brought their water samples and I taught them how to use the equipment that ALESS has. We created a baseline for all 40 water collection points, a lot of which were streams and springs. In the end they never did do the logging, but it created a great opportunity for people to understand a bit more about their water supply.”
This data will soon be filed with the Columbia Basin Water Hub, which is a central place for open source water data and information, research, and collaboration across the Columbia Basin.
Richard is also a Technical Advisor with Living Lakes Canada (LLC). He has been involved with coordinating a local reference group focused on surface water monitoring. “This was one of three pilot projects that LLC initiated,” he explains. “I managed the Arrow Lakes, the Slocan Valley, and the north part of Kootenay Lake, to find the key people and to determine where we should install water monitoring sites. These are mostly hydrometric stations for measuring water flow because there’s a lack of information on water volumes.”
LLC’s Groundwater Monitoring Program also benefits from Richard’s guidance in advising them on areas, in the West Kootenay primarily, where monitoring of wells would be beneficial to improve the database and to more accurately map the aquifers. The data gathered from this monitoring program is catalogued in the Groundwater Program Reports and Resources section of the Columbia Basin Water Hub.
Richard is also working with Cora Skaien, Ph.D. on monitoring vegetation regrowth following wildfire. They are looking at past wildfire burns in the Nature Conservancy of Canada’s Darkwoods Conservation Area and in the Silverton Creek drainage. “One of my interests is in remote sensing and in artificial intelligence, so I catalog what we find at the sites, including camera trap data. We got a photo of a wolverine in the camera trap in the Silverton Creek drainage,” he adds.
Using satellite data, Richard and Cora are relating the burn intensities with the vegetation that was there before the fire, as well as correlating this to various other parameters, such as the amount of chlorophyll before the burn and for four years afterwards. The goal is to understand more about vegetation regrowth after a wildfire, and they are planning on enhancing regrowth by conducting aerial seeding from a drone on both sites. These will be little fertilized pods with mycelium and likely huckleberry seeds, which are a pioneer species after a burn.
Richard and Cora are also working with the Okanagan Nation Alliance on several projects involving huckleberry enhancement near China Creek, where they are considering doing a controlled burn and monitoring the effects on bear populations. They are also looking into the feasibility of doing a controlled burn to enhance native grasses at Fort Shepherd Conservancy Area.
Richard has had a long interest in utilizing spatial and other types of technologies to gather and interpret data. For several years now, Richard has been working with 2nd and 3rd year students in the GIS program at Selkirk College by suggesting real world projects that will forward his research in mapping and spatial analysis. He is excited about projects that involve the use of LiDAR, an active remote sensing technology used to map the earth’s surface, and he finds real-life projects for students to delve into.
Together with his wife Susan Johnson, Richard continues to teach geologists and engineers in the oil and gas industry how to do water analysis interpretation, as they have been doing for over 20 years. Using a finger printing system, he has categorized oilfield brines by geological age in BC, Alberta and Saskatchewan, and they both consult worldwide on this technique. He is now transferring that knowledge to freshwater systems, mapping aquifers and developing simple ways to test freshwater samples to detect surface contamination.
Richard is surprisingly keen and excited about the potential of artificial intelligence (AI) to efficiently find and sort through all the information we have at our fingertips. Part of his nugget of advice for young people starting off their careers is to learn about AI and adopt it as a tool as soon as possible since what’s being developed right now with AI is quite incredible, and on a growth curve that’s exponential.
With 58 years’ experience as a professional engineer, Richard says that now conservation is “what all my current work comes around to. It’s all about the natural world that we’re living in and how we handle it or mishandle it. I tend to be non-political; I like to work with people, and support people with their interests and passions.”
Thank you, Richard, for sharing your knowledge, interests and passions with so many people and organizations here in the Kootenays.
Photos: Richard Johnson and Kayla Harris looking at groundwater seepage at a road cut near one of the Volunteer Observation wells in the Living Lakes Canada Groundwater Monitoring Program; a black bear sleeping in Richard’s backyard; old meander channels of the Little Slocan River just before it joins the Slocan River. This photo was generated using QGIS mapping software, and helps Richard to interpret the potential aquifers that are in a river bed. Water will be flowing into and out of these sands and gravels in hyporheic flow related to the river flow.
