The Burnaby Mountain (elev. 370 m) is a low forested hill located in the City of Burnaby and it is the origin of several streams such as Simon Cr., Nicholas Cr., Crab Cr., and Cougar Cr. that run down the north face of the mountain into the Burrard Inlet, while the streams such as Eagle Cr., Silver Cr., and Stoney Cr. run down on the southern side into Brunette River.

As consequence of the agreement between SFU and Burnaby City (1995) to establish a new community at top of Burnaby Mountain, SCEC feared that this development will affect surrounding ecosystems and compromise the health and sustainability of the Stoney Creek. Thus between 1997 and 2002 SCEC carried out mapping projects with the purpose of developing a baseline information of the watershed that can be used to monitor effects that the urbanization at the mountaintop may have on wildlife, water quality and fish habitats. As well as studying the after-effects when community is completed.

As result of this project map sets such as land cover, trails, streams, landscape features (e.g. discharges, culverts, erosion points, water bodies), water quality and others are available for Stoney Creek Wathershed.

Currently, we are building a geodatabase to make this information available through an Online-GIS. In recent years great advances in internet technology have promote the development of online GIS and the creation of several websites to deliver GIS over internet, such as MapPlace2Go, iMapBC, Burnaby Map to numerate a few. For a compilation of relevant online GIS for British Columbia refer to http://goo.gl/ChyB7.

This project is using GIS Cloud (http://www.giscloud.com/) to store and display bio-physical information and Quantum GIS (http://www.qgis.org/) to edit thematic information (*.shp format). Initial work can be seen below.

Stoney Creek Online-GIS