Innovation Anthology #23: Scientific Director
Alberta’s boreal forest is criss-crossed by hundreds of thousands of kilometers of seismic lines.
At ten times the density of roads in the agricultural south, this giant grid facilitates oil and gas development in the north.
Forest ecologist Dr. Phil Lee researched the fate of seismic lines for the Integrated Landscape Management Program at the University of Alberta.
By tracking seismic lines through aerial photographs dating back to 1949, Dr. Lee found that black spruce stands fared the worst. Seismic lines through these low moist spruce bogs had no regeneration of trees at all.
DR. PHIL LEE: The bulldozers take off the top layer of the sphagnum moss and turn what was a bog into a fen. A fen is a much wetter environment and does not support the regeneration of trees on it naturally. So what happens is these turn into canals through the bog forest. They become wet and they stay wet. It’s unlikely these will ever come back. They appear to be permanent features on the landscape now.
That’s why Dr. Phil Lee recommends low impact seismic for black spruce stands. Instead of bulldozers, foot crews with hand held saws can cut seismic lines so narrow, they’re not even visible from the air.
FOR INNOVATION ANTHOLOGY I’M CHERYL CROUCHER.
Guest
Stephen Moore, PhD,
Alberta Prion Research Institute, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada,
Sponsor
NSERC Industrial Research Chair in Integrated Landscape Management
The Integrated Landscape Management Chair is developing a toolkit for ecologically informed land use planning. At the heart of this toolkit is a suite of models capable of integrating multiple land use activities over large areas and long time scales to explore the future impacts of todays land use decisions. The models do this by linking human actions to indicators of ecological, economic, and social condition. They are constrained by their ability to adequately represent the dynamics of complex systems, and our current research emphasis aims to reduce the uncertainties over the impacts of invasive organisms on species at risk in Canadas boreal forest.
The ILM Chair is an initiative of the Department of Biological Sciences at the University of Alberta, with sponsors and collaborators in academia, government, and the private sector.
Program Date: 2007-04-03