Innovation Anthology #380:
Reclamation ecologist Ann Smreciu has spent the last year learning how to grow native ratroot from both seed and root cuttings.
This native plant looks like cattails. And as Ann presented at the recent CONRAD conference, ratroot is showing a lot of promise for oil sands reclamation of wetlands.
ANN SMRECIU: Once we grow these up we’re trying to get them established in the wetlands that are being created around the oil sands. There’s a number of ways we’re doing that. We’re actually planting them into the shorelines of these small wetlands as well as growing them on what we call floating mats. Naturally acriss or the ratroot grows on these floating mats made up of cattails. We don’t know how to make those So we’re trying to use synthetic floating mats right now to just see if we can actually get these ratroot to grow in these wetlands. And later on we’ll look at more organic methodologies. We actually serendipitously ran into a system that we find might work. We grew some plants in flats in the greenhouses and realized they had knitted themselves into a mat by themselves. And we thought well maybe now we can take those natural mats and put them out and see if we can get the same success.
As for the floating test mats, Ann says geese like to nibble on the ratroot tops and muskrat like to pull the plants down through the mats.
Thanks today to Syncrude
FOR INNOVATION ANTHOLOGY
I’M CHERYL CROUCHER
Guest
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Sponsor
Syncrude
Program Date: 2011-03-01