British Columbia s Ecosystems British Columbia is a large and diverse province, more varied physically and biologically than any other similar-sized region in Canada. The province spans 11 degrees of latitude and 25 degrees of longitude and covers 95.2 million hectares. Broadly speaking, British Columbia is a cool, moist, mountainous, forested province. It has extensive plateaus, plains and basins as well as several roughly parallel series of mountains. All nine main groups of soils found in Canada occur in British Columbia.
Forests dominate the vegetation but areas of grasslands, wetlands, scrub and tundra are extensive.
Species diversity is high for all known groups of organisms. This chapter provides a broad overview of B.C. s forested and non-forested ecosystems. Glacial landforms, including cirques that occur at all elevations, dominate the St. Elias and Insular mountains. The terrain of the Coast and Cascade mountains is typical of intrusive igneous rocks that have undergone mountain glaciation. Within these mountains, thick deposits of glacial drift are restricted to valley bottoms and adjacent lower slopes.