Innovation Anthology #652:
Dr. Simon Landhausser holds the NSERC Industrial Chair in Forest Land Reclamation and Applied Forest Ecology at the University of Alberta.
Now that the Chair has been renewed for another five years, Simon and his students will research more ways to reclaim forests on oil sands mines.
DR SIMON LANDHAUSSER: For example we are looking at growing seedlings which are much taller than the normal seedlings so they can potentially out-compete grass on older reclamation sites. A second area is to create soil conditions on the sites which are more favorable for out trees to establish. One of the biggest problems is in some areas we have really poor soil conditions, so how can we get nutrients and other variables to our seedlings without actually giving it away to all kinds of competing vegetation we don’t want. So we are trying to set up sites with different operational procedures to kind of hide the nutrients and hide some of the goodies from the plants we don’t want to grow there and give it to the plants which we want to have there.
The overarching concern for Dr. Landhausser is the sustainability of these new forests, especially in an era of climate change.
Thanks today to SYNCRUDE
FOR INNOVATION ANTHOLOGY
I’M CHERYL CROUCHER
Guest
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Sponsor
Syncrude
Program Date: 2014-12-04