European colonization and industrial development have profoundly transformed the forested landscapes of north-eastern North America. Consequently, historical forest characteristics, such as forests prior to settlement and industrial exploitation (i.e. the presettlement forests), serve as a model for developing a sustainable forest management. In this project, we aim to reconstruct long-term changes in forest landscapes of southern Quebec.

Nova Scotia forests boast the second highest private ownership rate in Canada, with almost 3 of 4.5 million hectares owned by 30,000 woodlot owners and private corporations. Because of this, forest management practices vary widely. Though the Nova Scotian forests traditionally consist of large, mature, unevenly aged trees that support both important biodiversity and a thriving forest sector, mismanagement of these forests for decades has led to a decline of the forests and the rural communities that depend on them.

The proposed project will assess and quantify the energy transfer from wildland fires as it relates to coverage of vegetative fuel with wildland fire chemicals for protection of wildland/urban interfaces. The project will extend on preliminary work on the relative performance of wildfire chemicals (e.g., water, gel, foam, and long-term retardants) on forest vegetation. The results of this proposed project will further develop proactive fire control measures, a priori to the occurrence of a fire, for community protection.

This goal of this research project is to understand how wood fibre characteristics within planted and natural stands of spruce behave with changes to temperature and precipitation. Several methods of wood analysis will be used to determine this relationship including dendrochronology, scientifically dating tree-rings and comparing to climate, and analysis of fibre qualities, or cellular wood qualities, within samples of both natural and planted stands of spruce.

Hydrolysis lignins (HL) are a byproduct from acid or enzymatic biomass pretreatment processes such as the ones employed in cellulosic sugar and/or ethanol plants. They are mainly composed of lignin , unreacted cellulose and mono and oligosaccharides.

The present study investigates the impact of Eurasian honeybees on the functional diversity and reproductive ability of native stem-nesting bees. Honeybees have the potential to compete with native stem-nesting bees, however, currently no studies have examined this interaction in North American temperate forests. The main goal of this project is to develop a more mechanistic understanding of bee community composition and distribution, in particular, under the threat of exotic introduction.

This study will examine the relationship between reclamation methods and when deactivated roads become suitable for caribou, using developing UAV technology to monitor caribou while testing UAV effectiveness in the field. This will be done by establishing long-term cameras along reclaimed road sites, monitoring wildlife movement through the study areas and by completing aerial wildlife surveys with UAVs and different sensors to establish a baseline count of the animals within the area and aid in tracking their movements.

This MITACS internship will support Julie Fortin, an MSc student whose focus is on developing new techniques for analyzing oblique historical mountain survey images based on the world’s largest systematic collection of historical mountain survey images, the Mountain Legacy Project. Her research is driven by questions about shifts in biodiversity over time, built atop biodiversity data and models developed by Dr. Jason Fisher and his colleagues and crews with Alberta Innovates for Willmore Wilderness.

An emerging strategy for managing natural resources such as Canada's forests more sustainably and responsibly is to use knowledge of how Mother Nature has done it to help guide our hand. This so-called ‘ecosystem-based” approach has gained favour with provincial and federal governments, as well as national and international certification agencies.

AV Nackawic has experienced significant variations in the quality of its final product, including, pulp viscosity. There are many variables, both quality parameters of raw materials such as, wood species, chip size, and process conditions such as P- factor, EA, H-factor, play a key role in the overall quality of the final product. Due to the multivariable and complex nature of the issue, modelling/ data analyses using PCA and PLS analyses can reveal the key parameters that affect the pulp quality, thus gaining operational guidance.