University of Alberta

History

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The NSERC Industrial Research Chair in Integrated Landscape Management was established in 2001 to produce an ILM toolkit that will form the core of ecologically informed land use planning. The program is a collaboration between NSERC, industry, Alberta Government, and the University of Alberta.

In the first term of the Chair we conducted preliminary modeling of projected forestry, oil and gas development, and agricultural expansion in northeastern Alberta as forcasted by industry experts and government department business plans. The results showed that conversion to human-dominated habitats over the next 10 years will grow to 10%, forested habitats will become progressively younger, there will be less old growth forest on the landscape, and human-caused linear features (seismic, pipelines, roads) will grow to become a pervasive element of our landscapes.

We focused on the effects of linear features as a key uncertainty because they have no natural disturbance analogue, they have the potential to alter rates of key ecological processes such as animal movement and predator-prey dynamics, and industry was willing to adopt new best practices to reduce their size, intensity, and duration on the landscape. We found that the ecological effects of new seismic lines can be drastically reduced if line widths are reduced to <2m and this has become the industry standard.

We also showed that harmonization of the combined forestry and energy infrastructure (e.g., roads) can reduce the cumulative footprint considerably, a finding that supports ongoing collaboration by planners in both sectors.

However, in contrast to this “good news” on “best practices”, our research program during the first term of the Chair found strong evidence that in areas where the combined human footprint (old seismic, well sites, pipelines, roads, cutblocks) is high, there have been strong shifts in the vertebrate community in favour of generalist non-native species at the expense of native specialists. In the mammal community this was characterized by increases in white-tailed deer and coyotes and decreases in lynx, fisher, and caribou. Similar patterns existed in the forest bird communities where generalist sparrows and invasive brown-headed cowbirds were more common in landscapes with high human footprint.

We have identified the mechanisms (including the spatial scales at which they operate) and consequences of species invasion as key uncertainties for phase II (2006-2010) of the Chair because:

  1. The community changes underway are likely to have far ranging effects including possible woodland caribou extinction, creation of ecological traps, and disease spread.
  2. The spatial scale over which the mechanism(s) operate is crucial for management decisions.
  3. Current Integrated Landscape Management Models fail to incorporate non-native species invasions and their potential effects into scenarios.

The potential for changes in landscape structure to facilitate the spread of non-native species is of conservation concern the world over. Alberta provides a unique system in which to study the impacts of spatial pattern on non-native species because the diversity of resource sectors (agriculture, forestry, energy, recreation) has created a unique landscape mosaic of small yet relatively permanent disturbances intricately connected by a complex network of linear features within an overall forested matrix.

Last Modified: 2007-02-21