How many islands make up Haida Gwaii?
Two answers come to mind. The first, constructed from a string of measurements -138 islands in the archipelago, 42 fresh water lakes, over 1,600 kilometres of shoreline, and mountain peaks surpassing 1,000 meters above the surrounding sea level, all embodied 100 kilometres from BC’s northern coastline … The second, moves within these surveyed landscapes, defining ‘islands’ in terms of biodiversity, continuance and extinction.The way animals and plants are distributed over the earth is the business of biogeography. Why certain species are found in one place and not another, how they arrived there and what happened to the ones before them, is bound in worldviews and methods from biology, chemistry, paleontology and geology with roots going back to evolutionists Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace. More relevant to Haida Gwaii is ‘island biogeography’ – a theoretical window into the stories of plant and animal, living and disappeared, from an island’s sky, land and sea. How and when they
