Biodiversity Trajectories: Comparing Forest Recovery after Fires and Harvest

First, we compile data on fire, harvest, and silvicultural history within much of the green zone of Alberta to develop a set of maps to geographically display this information, as well as support study design and site selection for biodiversity monitoring.

Second, we conduct extensive field data collection across the Alberta green zone and subsequently analyze those data to evaluate how quickly and how well convergence between harvested stands and burned stands occurs for biodiversity and habitat elements. This builds on earlier work completed with Alberta-Pacific Forest Industries looking at convergence over shorter time periods.

Biodiversity and habitat element data will be collected in post-fire and post-harvest forest stands throughout the Boreal natural region of Alberta. We will implement ABMI’s terrestrial monitoring protocols across 90 survey sites between 2024 and 2027. At each site, we will deploy ARUs and remote cameras to monitor bird and mammal populations, respectively. Field crews will also collect vascular plant samples and record habitat information (e.g., density of stems, downed woody debris) to characterize vegetation and forest structure.

Data processing and analysis will focus on summarizing similarities in the bird, mammal, and vascular plant communities between similarly-aged post-fire and post-harvest forest stands. We will compare the communities in those stands to matched, older stands from the ABMI database, and will create detailed summaries of the age trajectories in each stand type of each analysable species, species group (e.g., “old-forest birds”), and habitat element.