This article appears in the September issue of Oilweek
Caribou are a symbol of Canada’s northern forests, but
their populations are under threat for a number of reasons. Other kinds of
ungulate – white-tailed deer, for example – are migrating into their habitat,
for example. This attracts wolves which, by increasing in population and range,
have become a greater threat to these iconic mammals.
Human activity, of course, has played important roles in
these developments. That makes it all the more noteworthy that two caribou-habitat
projects in Alberta’s boreal forest are consistent with a new but mostly
unspoken model of habitat protection. The idea is that the best place to
protect caribou is in areas away from industrial development. The best example
of this kind of project is a research effort sponsored by Cenovus. It’s known by
the acronym LiDea, which stands for linear deactivation.
As company spokesman Brett Harris explains, the
two-year-old project is “not on our project site. It’s on the northeastern side
of the Cold Lake weapons range” on the Alberta side of the border. According to
wildlife biologist Susan Patey-LeDrew, this area “provided ideal conditions for
us. The weapons range is a boundary that people don’t cross. Trappers won’t
cross it, hunters won’t go in there, and there are no activities by oil and gas
or other industrial operators.” This means there is an excellent “playground
for us to develop techniques and tweeze out specific responses to what we’re
doing.”
Beginning in the 1970s, seismic activity in the weapons
range and elsewhere in the northern forest created scars through the forest from
three- to five-metres wide, which to this day are highways for wolf packs to
use for hunting. This put pressure on the species of the boreal forest, as did “an
expansion of agriculture, which is moving progressively north,” according to Patey-LeDrew.
“With the agriculture come the white-tailed deer. So now you have more
white-tailed deer in the area, and these legacy highways which the wolves can
use. As a result, the wolves are coming out of their upland habitats into lower
areas. This creates a higher likelihood of encounter between predators and
caribou.”
“The really vulnerable time for caribou is when they’re
calving,” she adds. “The young are quite vulnerable and susceptible to being
taken down by wolves and even bears.” Some stop-gap measures can help the
situation – for example, “one of the things we’re trying is to put visual
barriers along these old seismic lines, to interfere with the wolves’ line of
sight. We can do that, but it isn’t adding to recovering the habitat itself.”
Mounds and Stands: As spokesman for the company, Harris
continually stresses that Cenovus is not fixing a problem it is responsible
for. It’s restoring habitat in an area where old ways of doing business left a
huge mess – a problem his company and its predecessors had nothing to do with. Using
a well-worn phrase, he says Cenovus took on the project “because it’s the right
thing to do.”
Today’s seismic surveys, which create minimal disturbance, wouldn’t
cause the problem Cenovus is dealing with, but these old seismic lines left
stubborn legacies. “For some reason, those lines are not growing back,” says Patey-LeDrew.
“There is a stagnant system there, and trees are not growing back the way natural
processes would suggest.”
Why? One possibility is that the heavy equipment used in
cutting those lines created too much compaction. Another is that, once the without
the trees growing there a change in the moisture regime. Using a favourite
phrase, she says the forest needs a “kick-start” to get the trees growing
again. “That’s what LiDea is all about. It’s easy to think you can just leave
it alone and the trees will come back by themselves, or that you can just plant
trees and they will grow. Unfortunately we’ve seen that this just doesn’t work.
We have to give it a kick-start to give the seedlings a higher success rate. By
planting the seedlings in the way we’re doing, we’re getting faster growth.”
She describes a number of techniques the company is using “to
get the trees to grow, and to grow faster.” The work is seasonal. In the
winter, backhoe operators build mounds. In the summer, contractors plant
seedlings (the company expects to plant 150,000 in the next few years). These
mounds provide a modified landscape along the old seismic lines – habitat in
which seedlings grow at higher elevations. This creates better habitat for
large beasts and reclaims the wolf highway.
A counter-intuitive approach to re-structuring the
landscape is the use of stand modification. “As we walk backwards down the
seismic lines, in heavily forested areas, we pull down every tenth tree. We
knock it down. By pulling down some trees and creating barriers, we block the
lines, making it harder for wolves and bears to move up and down them.” This
helps to restore the habitat, also: a lot of seeds get distributed into the
immediate environment, and they can begin to grow, for example, in the roots of
knocked-down trees. “This provides an immediate response. It gives our seedlings
a better chance to grow and restore the habitat.”
While LiDea on the surface seems like forestry work,
Cenovus is pairing it with detailed wildlife monitoring program using satellite
collaring, for example. According to Patey-LeDrew, “We don’t yet know how the
wildlife will respond, but for the project to make a difference the vegetation must
have a chance to grow successfully.”
The weapons range research is a Canadian Oil Sands
Innovation Alliance (COSIA) project, which means that Cenovus is sharing its results
among the groups’ 13 member companies. Collectively, the group’s members have
shared 560 distinct technologies and innovations that cost more than $900
million to develop. A collaborative project shared among six other COSIA members
– ConocoPhillips Canada, Nexen, Shell Canada, Statoil Canada, Suncor Energy and
Total E&P Canada – also focuses on caribou habitat. Known as the Algar project,
this effort also aims to repair fragmented habitat in a region outside the
lands licensed by the participating companies. Like the weapons range project, Algar
has used mounding, innovative approaches to seeding, and extensive use of
wildlife monitoring to understand how best to improve caribou habitat.
Under Construction: It is not entirely surprising that both
COSIA projects are taking place away from oil sands development. “Why would you
create ideal habitat for caribou where large-scale development makes economic
sense?” asks contrarian Robert Fessenden.
Fessenden’s background includes a forestry degree from the University
of Toronto, and other degrees including a PhD in soil microbiology from McGill.
He worked for the Alberta Research Council, where in 1988 he was “kicked
upstairs to the executive,” as he calls his appointment to VP. He became president
of the Alberta Science and Research Authority in 1995, then an “accidental
Deputy Minister. I say accidental because I never applied for a position.” When
the province started moving deputy ministers around, “I got moved into Economic
Development, then into Sustainable Resource Development, and then into Innovation
and Science.” He retired in 2010.
Fessenden provides the counter-balance to the question of
restoring caribou habitat. Acknowledging that caribou management is an
important issue, he argues that in areas where oil sands mining and other
intensive development makes sense, “there’s no way you can protect it for
caribou.” Fessenden believes government’s position should be that “for the next
hundred years [areas where oilsands mining takes place] is clearly not going to
be conducive to caribou, so we’re going to take another portion of the province
and make that really good for caribou. In a hundred years we can introduce
caribou back into this area. In the big scale of time, a surface-mined area is
a temporary disturbance. A lot of people have difficulty thinking about 100 or
150 years as a temporary disturbance, but I come out of forestry [where we
think] about long rotations.”
Always quick to speak his mind, Fessenden sees the
reclamation of mining pits, for example, as an opportunity to create a better
landscape. “The guys who like bogs at the University of Alberta took me to task
for saying that. Maybe the politics weren’t right at the time.” In a sense, the
two COSIA projects reflect Fessenden’s point of view. They are taking place in
areas where oil sands development isn’t contemplated, and they are improving
landscape and habitat.
