About this Web Site
Middle Shuswap Watershed
The Shuswap River arises in the Columbia Icefield of the Rocky Mountains and empties into the Thompson River, which flows into the Fraser and thence to the Pacific Ocean. Its length between its source and the Thompson can be imagined conveniently in three sections.
The Upper Shuswap, stretching from the river's source to Sugar Lake, flows through mountainous territory, with no mines or industrial activities other than excessive logging.
The Lower Shuswap stretches from Mabel Lake to Shuswap Lake whose outflow continues as the Thompson River. This section flows through wide bottom land with an enormous agricultural presence along its banks and considerable logging in the surrounding hills.
The water bodies whose parameters are posted in this web site all (but one) lie in what is known as the Middle Shuswap River, which flows for about 50 km through the Interior Plateau of British Columbia between Sugar and Mabel Lakes.
Pacific salmon spawn in the Shuswap River and its tributaries as far upstream as Shuswap Falls, about 20 km beyond Mabel Lake, where they are blocked by WIlsey Dam. Less than a km below the dam is the mouth of Bessette Creek where they can continue more than 15 km, through the village of Lumby and into various tributaries of that creek.
Middle Shuswap Water Stewards
Volunteers in Cherryville and rural Lumby have been sampling the Mid Shuswap River and its tributaries since about 2010 (depending on which group), and sending the samples for analysis at the CARO Analytic Services laboratory in Kelowna.
The Lumby Group (MSL) is reported as part of the Mabel Lake Community Club & Recreation Commission, a registered Society. A group sampling in the upper half of Middle Shuswap is known as the Cherryville Water Stewards, is reported under the Cherry Ridge Management Society (CRM). The lab analyses and use of vehicle expenses for these two groups have been funded by the Regional District of North Okanagan (RDNO). Another sampler is Claude Labine who funds his own testing and is known herein as Campbell Scientific Corporation (CSC).
The laboratory is able to test for a vast number of compounds in water, and the number of parameters requested of them has had to be limited because of budget constraints. The analytes reported here are primarily for agricultural and recreational effects, rather than industrial or municipal, although many of the compounds tested for can result from several or all of these.
Database Purpose
A sampling field trip visits several sites on various water bodies and receives results which are grouped by field trip. Results are therefore not amenable to viewing over extended time frames nor by watercourse, sampling site etc. Such analysis has required manual (visual) extraction to a spreadsheet to display this contiguous data meaningfully.
The solution to this poor access is an online relational database containing all the data and the ability of selecting and sorting it as desired. Hence this web site.
It includes not only the results of testing the Mid Shuswap watershed, but also:
• explanations of many of those parameters tested: /web/reference
• documentation of the internal concepts of the database & how to maintain its data up to date: /web/documentation