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Assessing the level of difficulty of vegetation establishment on reclaimed sites

British Columbia Mine Reclamation Symposium; University of British Columbia. Norman B. Keevil Institute of Mining Engineering

Regulatory approvals for oil sands mining in Alberta, Canada, require that disturbed land be reclaimed to a self-sustaining, locally common boreal forest ecosystem; biodiversity is also a key stakeholder concern. Not all ecosites are readily reclaimed, yet conceptual reclamation plans often make assumptions that discount this challenge. To this end, we have developed a ranking system that uses measurable values to determine the level of difficulty to establish target vegetation on upland and transitional reclaimed sites. The ecosite phase reclamation targets of the Athabasca Oil Sands (Alberta, Canada) were used as a model system. Six metrics were used to determine the relative difficulty to reclaim each upland and transitional ecosite phase: time required for target vegetation establishment, level of management required, difficulty associated with achieving the requisite edaphic (soil moisture and nutrients) regime, sensitivity to changing soil chemistry, utility of direct soil placement and erosion potential. Each metric was given a weighted value (1 through 4) according to its overall influence on the difficulty of reclaiming each ecosite phase. The weighted values of metrics deemed difficult, neutral and easy for a particular ecosite phase were multiplied by −1, 0 and +1, respectively. The values for all six metrics were then summed for each ecosite phase, yielding an overall value for the difficulty to reclaim each phase. Values below −2 were deemed to be difficult, −2 to +2 were deemed neutral and values exceeding +2 were deemed not difficult (“easy”) relative to the innate challenges of reclaiming anything on the scale of mineable oil sand leases. This method of quantifying the level of difficulty in establishing target vegetation communities can be applied to any post-disturbance reclamation project. Its adoption would have broad-scale implications on activities from reclamation planning to revegetation practices and monitoring techniques.

Text

2016-09-01

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/58446

Unreviewed

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/