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.

No Two Wetlands are the Same

When no two wetlands are the same, how do you quantify what a healthy wetland looks like? Is there a threshold of conditions for ecosystem health, and what stressors will push a wetland over this threshold? These are the questions that Jan Ciborowski, Professor and Natural Sciences Engineering and Research Council (NSERC) Canada’s Oil Sands Innovation Alliance (COSIA)Industrial Research Chair in Oil Sands Wetland Reclamation at the University of Calgary, wants answered. The Chair is a pioneering research program aimed to help oil sands companies achieve more sustainable wetland reclamation, made possible by a partnership between NSERC and COSIA, the innovation arm of the Pathways Alliance.

In the study area, wetlands make up a whopping 43% of the landscape; answering these questions is critical to broader landscape functioning. The table below summarizes the diversity of wetland types within the study area as a percentage of the total land.

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To determine wetland health, most environmental assessment models use a mature wetland as the baseline for comparison. However, these models don’t capture the myriad ways wetlands naturally vary across landscapes over time. Ciborowski and his team are developing a new paradigm, termed the Reclamation Assessment Approach.

“The world is pretty complicated and variable,” said Ciborowski. “One of the unique features of what we’re doing is trying to make sure we’re looking at enough wetlands to really say something about the range of natural variation.”

Examining 120 Wetlands near Fort McMurray Alberta

Ciborowski and his team of students have executed a rigorous monitoring program of 120 wetlands in the Fort McMurray, Alberta area. Each was carefully chosen to capture the full range of natural variation and to include wetlands within and outside of areas disturbed by mining activity. A teach site, the team collects real-time data on potential stress factors affecting wetlands. These fall into four main categories: wetland permanence (is it wet all the time?), water quality (how salty is it?), land disturbance (are there industrial features nearby?) and wetland maturity (how young is the wetland?).

The sheer scale of this monitoring program alone is a massive undertaking.

“We could never do this 10 years ago,” notes Ciborowski. “We’ve got fantastic new technology that is telling us the day-to-day or minute-to-minute changes in wetlands which adds up to a great deal of information. We could never do all of this without the support of COSIA and NSERC.”

To understand the impact of these stressors, the team must also quantify how individual wetlands respond to stress at an ecosystem level.

“The response impact is what the biota are doing” adds Ciborowski, “the invertebrates, the birds and the plants.”  

Despite ever-grueling field conditions and COVID-related setbacks, the students have achieved an impressive level of data collection. Field work is expected to wrap up this coming spring with data analysis soon to follow, and some preliminary analysis currently in progress. Initial comparisons, illustrated by the chart below, suggest that young, reclaimed wetlands have a broadly higher conductivity (a water quality measure indirectly related to dissolved ions like salt that contribute to salinity) than young undisturbed wetlands.

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Next, Ciborowski plans to determine how biodiversity changes as a stress factor are dialed up or down. For some stressors, there is a level at which key biodiversity indicators drop off sharply. For instance, the team has observed dramatic shifts in insect diversity in wetlands above a certain level of salinity. This indicates an important threshold that could guide reclamation.

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“We are looking at upper and lower boundaries and thresholds, not the shape of the trend line in the middle,” Ciborowski explains.

Defining Conditions for a Healthy Ecosystem

By combining the findings for each stress factor, this assessment approach will help define the necessary conditions for a healthy ecosystem across a wide range of wetland types, and pinpoint whether a given wetland is at risk. Eventually, the team hopes to develop predictive models that will help practitioners determine how likely are claimed wetland will shift from a successful to unsuccessful state, based on its unique set of conditions.

As the program enters its fourth year, Ciborowski has high hopes for the impact of the research. He notes that the legacy of the project will not only directly inform oil sands reclamation practitioners and support more effective wetland reclamation, but that the paradigm could eventually be applied across other industries, ecosystems and environments.

“Although we are using the oil sands and the wetlands as a proof-of-concept,” said Ciborowski, “this Reclamation Assessment Approach can be used to study any ecosystem, in any environment, anywhere in Canada.”