Grant: Alliance Grants

Conserved areas in populated regions of southern Canada are often far below international standards and many natural ecosystems are still being transformed for human infrastructure. Our Alliance project proposes to provide guidelines for accelerating restoration of a forest ecosystem that will be resilient to global changes, that will have a positive impact on carbon and that will attract and be used by diverse faunal groups. We will actively work with a government ministry (Ministère des Transports et de la Mobilité durable) that has obligations for carbon neutrality and compensating ecosystems lost to road development and a conservation group (Ambioterra) that is actively promoting techniques to maintain biodiversity. The research team will test approaches to creating forests, across a 25 ha area, that are resilient to future changes and that will rapidly provide habitat for biodiverity. Approaches to be experimented include different densities of multi-species and multi-genotype plantations and the addition of biological legacies such as dead wood. The researchers will directly measure vigour and health of the forest and select taxa of biodiversity. This will include how different forest patterns can modify noise from the highway construction during breeding seasons, how addition of woody debris improves soil arthropod stucture. Base-line measurements will also permit long-term monitoring of the influence of forest structural management on multiple taxonomic groups. We will also monitor the carbon balance before and after interventions in aquatic and terrestrial systems. Results on the tested approaches will help practitioners to develop better practices for ecosystem restoration in landscapes greatly modified by human infrastructures. A strong and on-going collaboration with our partners, will produce guidelines on restoring forests resilient to climate change, that will provide habitat for wildlife and for which the carbon balance will be known. Our Alliance project will train a diverse group of personnel to use and evaluate the success of considering structure, biological legacies on biodiversity, forest resilience and carbon balance in ecological restoration.