Boreal Ecosystem Recovery and Assessment (BERA) Project, Phase 2

The boreal region of Alberta is under increasing pressure from natural resource extraction. Roads, well sites, seismic lines (petroleum-exploration corridors), forest harvest areas, and other elements of human footprint exert cumulative environmental effects that influence vegetation communities, wildlife, hydrology, and carbon dynamics. The Boreal Ecosystem Recovery and Assessment (BERA) project is a research partnership of academic institutions (University of Calgary, University of Alberta, Trent University, University of Waterloo) and private-sector companies (Alberta-Pacific Forest Industries Inc., Canadian Natural Resources Ltd., Cenovus Energy, and ConocoPhillips Canada Resources Corp.). Its central goal is to understand the effects of industrial disturbance on natural ecosystem dynamics in the boreal forest, and to develop strategies for restoring disturbed landscapes.

This 5 year NSERC project leveraged modern geospatial technologies to assist in measuring, modeling, and predicting recovery of vegetation and wildlife on non-permanent human-footprint features in the boreal forest of Alberta. It provided new insights into the effect of industrial disturbances on vegetation, and soil/topography, while developing novel remote-sensing approaches to mapping, measuring, and recording changes in and around human-footprint features. Knowledge, restoration strategies, and monitoring tools required to connect local treatments to regional management outcomes are still lacking, so the second phase of BERA will involve understanding interconnected responses and controls between disturbance and abiotic conditions, and their effects on vegetation, wildlife, and carbon dynamics in a system under pressure from climate change.