Retrospective analysis of operational legacy restoration

Alberta’s natural resource sector has resulted in the continuous and persistent loss of forest productivity. Despite huge strides in reclamation practices within the last 40 years, there is still a sizeable legacy of industrial disturbed sites that represent a significant opportunity to enhance the sustainability of the forest industry in the province.

Forest companies have been engaged in varying levels of reforestation of these disturbed sites but success has been mixed because often, the success of the program is not consistently assessed. This program presents a unique opportunity to evaluate forest regeneration success (or lack thereof) to address this knowledge gap between implementation treatments and the relative success of these treatments. The project’s core objective is to provide a quantitative understanding of forest recovery following an operational scale restoration program and to extract patterns in ecological region, ecosite or other attributes that may be used to predict forest regeneration ‘success’.

Faculty Supervisor:

Amanda Schoonmaker;Mark Baah-Acheamfour

Student:

Partner:

Weyerhaeuser

Discipline:

Earth science

Sector:

Agriculture; Manufacturing

University:

Northern Alberta Institute of Technology

Program: