Project Description:

Dismantling 30 km of forest roads. They test different techniques including soil preparation and planting trees. It was to test the operational feasibility and identify cost.

Project Location: North Shore region (100 km northwest of Tadoussac)

Project Description:

Dismantling 20 km of forest roads.  Soil decompaction, watercourse crossing removal, black spruce plantation.

Project Location: Parc National de la Gaspésie

Project Outcomes or Intended Outcomes: Habitat restoration.

Project Description:

Defined the roads network that be can dismantling with all the issues on territory (strategic road, cabins access, future forest managing activities, etc.).

Project Outcomes or Intended Outcomes:

Map of potential road that can be dismantling.

Project Description:

Dismantling 76.5 km of forest roads. We test different techniques including soil preparation, water course crossing removing and planting four species of trees. It was to test the operational feasibility and identify cost.

Project Location: North Shore region (160 km north of Baie-Comeau)

Project Outcomes or Intended Outcomes:

The operational feasibility was valid. The cost of dismantling forest roads was around $5000-$6000 by km.

Project Description:

The Regional Industry Caribou Collaboration (RICC) is a group of energy and forestry companies who support caribou recovery efforts in the Cold Lake, East Side of the Athabasca River (ESAR) and Saskatchewan boreal plains caribou ranges. The group recognizes that the success of caribou recovery requires coordination and cooperation between each member, because caribou are wide-ranging animals whose annual home ranges cross many industry leases and land-use types. RICC is a leader when it comes to supporting research to understand caribou declines and testing ways to recover populations.

Project Outcomes or Intended Outcomes:

Program Goal:
To participate in collaborative research and active, science-based adaptive management activities within the defined ESAR and Cold Lake caribou ranges.

Objectives:

• Coordinate industry restoration of disturbance in priority areas;
• Support and lead scientific research on caribou ecology and on caribou-predator-landscape relationships to identify priority issues and/or priority areas; and
• Support and lead investigative trials on restoration methods, effectiveness and wildlife responses, to assess the effectiveness of treatments and make recommendations for broader implementation.

Wood was awarded a contract in 2008 to undertake baseline wildlife assessments in the study area and develop and conduct a long-term mammals monitoring program (focused on caribou, moose and wolves). The monitoring program measures wildlife responses to mine redevelopment locally as well as more regionally within the Kesagami range and informs mitigation and compensation components of provincial Species at Risk approvals. Monitoring objectives are focused on identifying important seasonal habitat areas that have the potential to be directly or indirectly impacted by the mine or any future expansion. The focus of the monitoring program is on delineating more detailed baseline information on spatio-temporal parameters of woodland caribou including annual and seasonal range use, fidelity to core use and/or seasonal ranges that may directly inform impact assessments as well as compensation and mitigation strategies to be implemented. A road network habitat restoration project is in the initial consultation/planning phase. Caribou monitoring methods undertaken at the range scale include satellite telemetry (n=20 collars and mortality investigations), systematic aerial surveys of ungulate-wolf occurrence and caribou herd composition. The caribou surveys include group classification (age, sex) and calf recruitment to support population modelling of state and vital rates.

Project DescriptionOff-Highway vehicles are widely used on these seismic lines and can hamper vegetative re-growth because of ongoing physical damage and compaction. Understanding where motorized activity may be impeding regeneration of seismic lines will help to prioritize restoration. To target restoration efforts, our objective was to use field and GIS data to determine factors that best explained levels of motorized ATV use on seismic lines. The study was focused within the ranges of two boreal caribou herds (Little Smoky, Chinchaga), and three central mountain caribou herds (A La Peche, Redrock Prairie Creek, Narraway).

Project Outcomes or Intended Outcomes

• ATV use was driven by local topography and vegetation attributes of seismic lines that facilitated ease-of-travel.
• In the northern boreal landscape (Chinchaga), ATV use was most common in dry areas with a large industrial footprint.
• In highly disturbed areas of the foothills (Little Smoky, A La Peche), ATV use increased in areas with low vegetation heights, dryer soils, and closer to forest harvest, while in less disturbed areas of the foothills (Redrock Prairie Creek, Narraway), motorized activity decreased with seismic line density, slope, and white-tailed deer abundance, and increased with distance to roads.
• We generated predictive maps of motorized activity identifying 21,777 km of seismic lines where active restoration could expedite regeneration

This study evaluates the effects of closing and dismantling forest roads on the behavior of caribou, their predators, and alternate prey. This study uses a large network of camera traps on treated and control forest roads. The number of individuals from each species counted on roadside cameras will be related to treatment, as well as several covariates such as local density of each species, time, recent weather conditions, and local characteristics of each road section.

Forest roads represent a major disturbance in several boreal caribou ranges across Canada. As such, the development of an effective method for restoring forest roads would be a significant gain, balancing the socio-economic impacts of sustainable resource management and land use with national commitments to conserve biodiversity. The proposed work could be used to restore roads created during past harvest operations, thus improving the quality of critical habitat for boreal caribou, or to identify new ways to develop forest road networks that take caribou habitat into account.