Search by Area

Results reflect the species or ecological communities that occur or potentially occur in your selected area of interest and are limited to species and ecological communities where range data is available. Available range data generally tends to be for Red- or Blue-listed or legally designated species and ecological communities, but this is not a complete list (see list here). Range data (therefore search results) will be continuously updated and will become more complete over time.

Range data is a broad-scale representation of a species' or ecological community’s geographic distribution in British Columbia. The species range data are created using BC CDC occurrence data, other publicly available data, and expert opinion. The ecological community data are created using Biogeoclimatic Ecosystem Classification (BEC) polygons. For more information about the range data please refer to the metadata records in the BC Data Catalogue for Species and Ecological Communities.

Note: Your other selected search criteria will be applied to your search by area (e.g. Red-listed birds in your area of interest).

Choose between the following search options:

User Defined Area of Interest (AOI):

• Draw your area of interest: Using the tools on the left side of the map, zoom/pan as needed and then draw your AOI using the rectangle or polygon tool. You can edit or delete what you have drawn if needed.
• Upload a shapefile: All files associated with your shapefile will need to be zipped. You will then select the zipfile to upload to the map. Note that complex shapefiles (i.e. many vertices) maybe generalized to reduced in complexity so that the it does not generate an error.  If this is the case you may see more species and/or ecological communities included in your result than you expected.

Pre-defined Layers:
Select the layer you want to use for your search, then click on the map or on the tabular list of values. You can select more than one area/polygon within a layer by holding Ctrl or Shift while making selections. To reset your search, click on the blank row at the top of the tabular list. You cannot combine search layers (e.g., you can only use one layer to search). Layers include:

• Natural Resource (NR) Districts
• Natural Resource (NR) Regions
• ENV Regional Boundaries
• Ecosections
• Ecoregions
• Regional Districts
• BC Parks, Ecological Reserves and Protected Areas
• National Parks
• Municipalities
• Local Trust Areas

Information about the layers above can be found here.

Note: When selecting a predefined area of interest (e.g. Municipalities, Regional Districts, etc.) the tool performs a spatial overlay with the user’s area of interest and range data as opposed to the tabular lists that were previously used.  The tabular lists were becoming out of date and labour intensive to update.  Species range data are based on Ecosection linework and ecological community range data are based on Biogeoclimatic linework.  Range data are created for Red or Blue listed or legally designated species and ecological communities, but not necessarily for all of them.  The species and ecological community ranges are currently being reviewed by experts and thus the range data (and by extension the search results) are continuously updated and will become more complete and accurate through time.  Please review your results from the Search by Area tool for anomalies.

Please send suggestions for additional pre-defined layers to cdcdata@gov.bc.ca for consideration.