Webinar - Informing Woodland Caribou Habitat Restoration Strategies Through an Innovation Roadmap

Restoration of legacy seismic lines within woodland caribou habitat has received considerable attention in the last seven years in western Canada. Restoration programs have successfully transitioned from testing techniques at an experimental scale to delivering operational scale programs of up to 350 km per year. However, restoration is extremely expensive, averaging $8,000-$16,000 per kilometre. Clearly, innovation is required to continue to advance operational implementation of restoration programs, and to achieve larger scale implementation at lower cost.
To help guide the identification of innovation opportunities for linear restoration, a series of organizations came together to fund a Restoration Innovation Roadmap. The goal was to facilitate adaptive management within restoration programs and to expedite learnings and efficiencies for future restoration programs. The first phase of this roadmap identified a total of eight key conclusions and opportunities to reduce costs and improve effectiveness were identified. These ranged from ecological knowledge related to successful tree re-establishment following restoration, to operational guidelines such as exploring opportunities to create new microsites using new implements to increase the efficiency and quality of treatments. The second phase identified a series of new technologies and techniques that could significantly increase the efficiency of restoration treatments, while maintaining or improving the ecological effectiveness. A total of 23 potential technologies or techniques were identified that could reduce the costs of restoration treatment delivery while maintaining or improving ecological effectiveness. The core observation from this study is that the cumulative impact of adopting multiple innovations could lead to a significant change in the way restoration programs could be delivered in the future.