Faster Forests Program Reports and Visual Guides

Faster Forests was launched in 2009 to develop techniques that accelerate and enhance the recovery of the forest ecosystem by exploring opportunities throughout the entire cycle of construction, operation, and reclamation. The reports in this project describe the program’s findings from 2015 to 2020 including two visual guides (A Visual Guide to Planting and A Visual Guide to Improved Construction and Reclamation Practices on Oil Sands Exploration Sites) and a literature review report on improving OSE reclamation performance.

The preliminary results from a study measuring productivity on Faster Forests OSE sites found that Faster Forests planting significantly increases the amount of vegetation as measured with multispectral satellite imagery compared with unplanted OSE sites. An efficacy assessment of the Faster Forests methods will determine whether these activities indeed enable forests to grow back faster than conventional methods.