Burns Bog is big – it occupies c. 3,000 ha on the Fraser River delta in Lower Mainland of BC- nearly 4 times bigger than the biggest UK raised bog at Flanders Moss, Scotland and the largest raised bog . Despite getting lost in the ‘burbs of Richmond/Delta, I met Sarah Howie from the Corporation of Delta in blistering sunshine, a welcome change from rainforest/English weather!
As we drove to meet staff from Metro Canada, we saw agricultural, residential and industrial development isolating the bog from other semi-natural land.
Cranberry farming on edge of bog
Less than half of the original bog area is intact in one block and extensive peat mining has affected the hydrology of more than half of the remaining bog area (typical of most lowland peatlands then!).
Yet the large undisturbed area we first visited shows up well on aerial photographs and supports healthy bog communities and peat formation and is mostly very wet although with many more trees than I am used to
Elsewhere there are many ditches. The Ecosystem Review document, an essential reference guide, reports the rapid discharge has lowered the average water table in the surface layer (the acrotelm) by about 25 cm from the 1930s and many ditches reach the centre of the water mound.
Sarah is studying the lagg zone (the margins of the water mound) which receives water from the bog and buffers bog water from adjacent nutrient rich, mineral water. Her studies of pristine lagg further north suggest that changes in water storage and water table in the past few decades have allowed forested vegetation to advance adjacent to the lagg zone.
The height and frequency of lodgepole pine shrank as we walked into the heath and Sphagnum (12 species but we were not counting) dominated pristine vegetation with cloudberry, bog-rosemary, crowberry and velvet-leaf blueberry. The bog also is a refuge for a tiny poupulation of the Greater Sandhill Crane population, where once numbers had been huge.
People (and vehicles) are kept out of the bog partly because the massive fire risk, both to neighbouring properties but also of course to the peat-forming vegetation.
Very flammable wood chip road with gas pipeline and pylons
After seeing the pristine bog, we crossed a ditch (blocked in places) and saw abandoned (in 1990s) cranberry cuts forming rectangular areas ideal for restoration but already colonising with heathy species and, according to Sarah, a few tiny patches of Sphagnum. Elsewhere widespread Sphagnum regeneration is occurring in abandoned peat workings.
Work over the last 10 years has identified, via aerial photos and latterly LIDAR, ditches that drain around the bog and a programme of ditch blocking is underway, together with hydrological monitoring (Sarah has been recording 80-100 piezometers bi-weekly, now monthly!). As we passed back to the wood chip road, we feasted on escaped blueberries 
and saw on the drier ground, two serious invasive plants in North America, Scotch Broom and Himalyan blackberry (but everyone loves the big fruit!).
The large tip at the edge of the bog (taking 40% of Vancouver’s waste) is an obvious issue as are the wider pressures of roads and farmland on its edges, but because of the degree of control through joint ownership and an agreed management plan, bog restoration is concentrating on the hydrology and there is little public or other stakeholder engagement. The work of blocking ditches is hampered by its wetness and so far ditches have been blocked by hand dug peat with wooden sheet facing on both sides, very time intensive and slow.
