As you move through the northern Alberta landscape, you are greeted by a seemingly endless network of wetlands, as varied as they are numerous. Young or old, bog or fen, open or covered in trees—it’s these differences that make each wetland home to a unique community of mammals, birds, plants, bugs and other life. Oil sands companies are working hard to reduce their impact and reclaim disturbances like tailings into healthy wetlands, but the diversity of these remarkable ecosystems also makes them a challenge to restore.
read moreSummer of 1992. Rubber boots. Straw bales. Piles of wet, chopped mosses. A group of peat producers, researcher sand students discussing, looking at plants through a magnifier or delicately spreading thin layers of mosses over small parcels of dark bare peat. This strange picture describes the first steps of what would later become a central pillar of the Canadian Horticultural Peat Industry’s Responsible Management commitments:the development of a restoration method for peat extraction sites.
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