Southern Interior
The whole Southern Interior is the territory of Okanagan, Nlaka’pamux, Secwepemc, St’at’imc and Kalispell First Nations. It is in the rainshadow of the Coast Mountains in B.C. and the Cascade Mountains in Washington. It is warm and dry in the summer. In winter it gets very cold, but only the mountains and highlands get a lot of snow.
The landscape has dry grasslands, forests, deep river valleys and large lakes. Ponderosa pine and Douglas fir forests cover much of the area, providing homes for several rare types of bats and other mammals. Elsewhere in this ecoprovince you can find rocky hills, cliffs and even a desert.
The Trans Mountain pipeline, which carries diluted bitumen from Alberta, runs through the Southern Interior ecoprovince. This pipeline disturbs fragile grassland ecosytems and endangers the waterways of the region to oil spills. To learn how you can take action on this issue, visit our biodiversity and climate campaign pages.
The major cities are Kamloops, Vernon, Kelowna and Penticton.
