A wide range of vegetation, habitat, and soil parameters are potentially available for use as ecological recovery site condition indicators in a long-term reclamation benchmark monitoring program.
Three workshops held between December 2012 and March 2013 with members of the Ecological Recovery Monitoring of Certified Sites in Alberta Advisory Group examined a suite of vegetation, soil, and habitat indicators that could potentially be used to monitor recovery in a long-term reclamation monitoring program. Indicators were assessed based on the criteria listed above and ranked to determine which indicators would be most useful for monitoring ecological recovery. Workshop participants decided that the most important criterion was relevance of the given indicator, as an indicator will need to be sensitive to change in order for it to provide insights into recovery of reclaimed sites over time. An indicator that is not expected to vary across a gradient of disturbance would be a poor indicator of ecological recovery and thus should be excluded from use as an indicator (although it may be valuable to measure during an initial site visit to provide additional useful information for that site - e.g., soil texture). The other criteria listed above were also considered, but relevance was by far the most important criterion for selection of indicators for inclusion in the monitoring program.