PREVIOUS WORK

There has been extensive research on foraminifera as paleoecological proxies along the west coast of North America, although very few studies on the distribution of modern foraminifera have been carried out in coastal mainland British Columbia waters. The first published descriptive study on Recent foraminifera from off the coast of British Columbia was that of Cushman (1925), who described a few Recent species found in shallow waters in Queen Charlotte Sound. Cockbain (1963) described two main faunal divisions in Juan de Fuca and Georgia Straits, and linked those assemblages with the physical oceanography of the area. McCulloch (1977) described and illustrated the fauna found in several samples collected from Vancouver Harbor during her extensive taxonomic research on modern foraminifera of the Eastern Pacific. A key descriptive study of foraminifera found on the British Columbia shelf was produced by Patterson et al. (1998).

Several studies have focused on the continental shelf and on the Strait of Georgia in order to determine the Holocene climate history of the area (Mathewes et al. 1993; Patterson 1993; Guilbault et al. 1997; Guilbault et al. 2003)

The only previous foraminiferal studies carried out in the SBIC were an investigation of the distribution of foraminifera and thecamoebians in two marshes at the heads of Alison Sound and Belize Inlet (Vázquez Riveiros et al. 2007) and a study of the paleoceanographic history of the area during the last 1100 years based on foraminiferal data from Belize Inlet (Vázquez Riveiros 2006). However, there has never been any attempt to systematically describe and illustrate in detail the foraminiferal fauna that characterizes any of the coastal British Columbia fjords.