2026 Metro Vancouver Pest Activity Report
Neighbourhood-level pest activity across 32 Metro Vancouver areas — rats, carpenter ants, cockroaches, bed bugs, wasps, and wildlife. Editorial expert analysis from The Wild Pest field team. Open data, CC-BY 4.0.
The seven things you need to know
Every finding below is derived from the same scoring engine — applied identically across all 32 areas.
- 1
Sunshine Hills leads Metro Vancouver for norway rat activity (score 100/100)
Sunshine Hills sits on a habitat seam: established detached homes (1960s-1980s) on the residential side, mature forest and open-water drainage on the Watershed Park side. Norway rats migrate annually from those wild edges into nearby structures as temperatures drop, exploiting the crawlspace vents, dryer-vent gaps, and aging foundation seals typical of the era's housing
- 2
Kitsilano leads Metro Vancouver for carpenter ant activity (score 100/100)
Kitsilano is textbook carpenter-ant habitat. The neighbourhood's pre-1960 housing stock is dominated by wood-frame Craftsmans with cedar-shingle roofs — cedar wicks moisture, and carpenter ants follow moisture the way gulls follow a fishing boat
- 3
Commercial Drive leads Metro Vancouver for german cockroach activity (score 100/100)
Commercial Drive is the highest-density German cockroach activity zone in Vancouver outside Chinatown. The restaurant corridor between Venables and Grant produces near-continuous food waste and warm kitchen conditions — Blattella germanica's ideal habitat
- 4
Newton leads Metro Vancouver for bed bug activity (score 100/100)
Newton bed-bug activity is the most intense in our service area, driven by overlapping risk factors. Dense rental stock means continuous tenant turnover and high travel exposure
- 5
Sunshine Hills has documented activity across 7 different pest species — the broadest field-team coverage in the dataset
Across 100 pest×neighbourhood records, Sunshine Hills accounts for the largest set of documented species.
- 6
BC's 2023 SGAR restriction continues to reshape Norway rat treatment across Metro Vancouver
Second-generation anticoagulant rodenticides remain restricted province-wide. Every documented Norway rat record in this dataset reflects post-restriction methodology — non-repellent first-generation actives and physical exclusion as primary intervention.
Every pest, every area — one chart
Activity scores are normalised per pest so the hottest area for each species reads 100. Colour saturation tracks score directly. Click any cell to drill into the deep-link page for that combination.
Where each species is concentrated
Top 5 areas per species. Headline pests first; remaining species follow in average-score order. Click a species name for the field guide, an area name for the local activity page, or the score for the full pest×area deep dive.
Norway RatRattus norvegicus
Carpenter AntCamponotus modoc
German CockroachBlattella germanica
Bed BugCimex lectularius
Bald-Faced HornetDolichovespula maculata
Paper WaspPolistes dominula
House MouseMus musculus
Roof RatRattus rattus
Common House SpiderParasteatoda tepidariorum
Deer MousePeromyscus maniculatus
The score is reproducible. Run it yourself.
Five signals contribute to every cell — documented field-team presence, severity language, housing-stock match, climate match, and common-pest listing — combined under default weights and normalised per pest.
Every weight is published. Every input is in the curated content shipped on this site (the pest×neighbourhood records, location pages, and pest library). Anyone can rebuild the score with their own weights.
v1.0 is the editorial baseline. v2.0 adds quantitative service data.
Today’s edition computes the activity score from the curated content already published on this site — 100 pest×neighbourhood records authored by the TWP field team, 32 area pages with seasonal and housing-stock detail, and 28 species pages with risk and treatment specifics.
Once The Wild Pest crosses n ≥ 1,000 BC service records (projected Q1 2027), v2.0 will substitute live job aggregations for the editorial signal and publish a year-over-year comparison vs v1.0. The page route, the Dataset JSON-LD schema, and the download endpoints will stay identical so external citations don’t break.
This page is auditable: the scoring code lives at src/lib/pest-activity-report.ts and the unit tests at src/lib/pest-activity-report.test.ts in the open repository.