Innovation Anthology #653:
The effort to recreate the boreal forest where oil sands mining occurs is moving ahead, but there are many risks to sustainability.
Climate change is one. And as Dr. Simon Landhausser points out, there’s still a big knowledge gap.
Dr. Landhausser holds the NSERC Industrial Chair in Forest Land Reclamation and Applied Forest Ecology at the University of Alberta.
DR SIMON LANDHAUSSER: Well there’s still a lot of research that needs to be done and it’s more or less on a larger scale. We need to link our landscapes which we are building on these sites, We need to link the hydrology with with the landscape features and then with our overall vegetation and then how the whole landscape is going to look like. So in order to know, for example, how much water is being used by our forests and will be used in the future, we need to do very specific work on , where are the roots, how deep do they go, how much water do plants or certain trees use, how much leaf are they have? And those kind of relationships are crucial for us to make predictions on how well these forests are going to grown and how productive they are going to be or whether they continue to exists there in the future.
Thanks today to SYNCRUDE
FOR INNOVATION ANTHOLOGY
I’M CHERYL CROUCHER
Guest
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Sponsor
Syncrude
Program Date: 2014-12-09