Tag Archives: Lichens

The Cortes Island Academy looks ahead to 2024/25 & back at the past year

The Cortes Island Academy’s school year is over. Graduation was on January 25. Executive Director, Manda Aufochs Gillespie, just gave Cortes Currents an overview of the 2023/24 semester and a peek into the year that is just about to begin.

“This school year (Sep 2023-Jan 2024), the Cortes Island Academy was a lot of fun.  We learned a lot from our first year. So this year we really got to just revel in the model, the awesome kids and local knowledge holders that came out to make this year happen. It felt to me like a lot more fun, and a lot less trailblazing,” she began. 

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Wild Cortes (Part 2): Beyond the Main Exhibition Area

(This is the second part in a series about WIld Cortes, in Part 1 Sabina Leader Mense shows us through the main exhibition area.)

Cortes Island’s natural history centre just expanded. In addition to the main exhibition area, Wild Cortes now has displays in the Linnaea Education Centre’s lower atrium area. 

While the Ecolab has been operational for some time, it has not been widely publicized. In the conclusion of a two part series about the 2023 displays at Wild Cortes, local biologist Sabina Leader Mense (SLM) takes us outside of the main exhibition area.

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Mosaic wants to harvest 6 times more per hectare than the Cortes Community Forest rate, Ellingsen says

One of the founding directors of the Cortes Community Forest Co-operative says Mosaic Forest Management is proposing to harvest its lands on Cortes at a rate that is roughly six times greater than what the island residents are accustomed to. 

Continue reading Mosaic wants to harvest 6 times more per hectare than the Cortes Community Forest rate, Ellingsen says

All about moss: a closer look through an ecologist’s eyes

CKTZ News, through an LJI grant from Canada-info.ca

The Cortes Island Museum & Archives Society is hosting Moss Talk on Dec.12 at Manson’s Hall.

This is a sister event to the Moss Walk, which took place in Kw’as Park on Nov. 13. The presenter for both events is Dan Tucker, an ecologist with a healthy self-admitted obsession with bryophytes, which are a group of plants composed of mosses, hornworts and liverworts. He’s also well-versed in lichens, which are a symbiotic partnership between a fungi and an alga.

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