Oil Sands Swamp and Bog Reclamation Workshop

Fens, swamp and bog wetland classes make up a large portion of the pre-disturbance landscape, but their reclamation has not yet been attempted in the oil sands industry. The COSIA Swamp & Bog Reclamation Workshop was held on February 3 and 4, 2020, attended by guests from across industry, academia, government and consulting bodies, with the goal of engaging wetland and reclamation experts in a review of the current state of knowledge around swamps and bogs on reclaimed landscapes. Specific objectives were to: (1) establish current state of knowledge regarding swamps and bogs on reclaimed landscapes; (2) identify learnings from natural and constructed systems regarding re-establishment of swamps and bogs in the Alberta OSR; and (3) share perspectives and strategies relating to wetland establishment on closure mining or in situ landscapes.

(1) Swamp recognition is inconsistent due to a variety of historical classification systems and difficulty in remotely sensing this wetland type, so true abundance of swamps in the AB OSR is unclear; (2) swamps are forming opportunistically in reclaimed post-mined landscapes in the AB OSR, so swamp reclamation for in situ sites is likely possible. Future work could assess water chemistry, vegetation communities and thresholds of change in natural and opportunistic swamps; (3) future work could use the study of natural and opportunistic swamps to address knowledge gaps, using natural saline/sodic wetlands as natural analogues to vegetation communities that might develop in discharge areas of reclaimed mining environments; (4) reclaiming linear features associated with in situ developments to bogs is likely possible and methods could be further explored; and (5) creating bogs on reclaimed mine substrates with high pH levels and limited peat source for live transfer was thought to be unfeasible. The term ‘Sphagnum-dominated wetlands’ was generally agreed upon as a potentially achievable reclamation target.