Environmental Priority Issue - Protection and restoration of wilderness, natural areas and wildlife habitat
by Margaret Chandler
As we learned through the course of our recent needs assessment “Maximizing Effectiveness: An Assessment of Environmental Priorities and Voluntary Sector Capacity Needs in Alberta,” one of the four most important environmental issues for Albertans is wilderness and wildlife issues. This issue of Connecting focuses on wilderness and the following stories cover three initiatives taking place in Alberta. Alberta boasts a diverse landscape and these projects reflect that diversity.The first one, from an environmental group perspective, looks at the work of the Grizzly Bear Alliance. The second one gives a brief overview of Anadarko Canada Corporation’s project in the environmentally sensitive area of Great Sandhills, Saskatchewan. And finally from the provincial government, an update on the monitoring of the wildlife crossings, which were built with G8 Legacy funds.
The Grizzly Bear Alliance (GBA) is a registered Alberta nonprofit society committed to maintaining a healthy and self-sustaining grizzly bear population in the province of Alberta.
The Grizzly Bear Alliance has two major projects. The first one is the BearSafe Communities Program (funded by the Alberta Ecotrust) that teaches people how to coexist with black bears and grizzlies e.g., garbage management and responsible behaviour in bear habitat.
The second project is the GBA’s role in the Grizzly Bear Recovery Plan, which is now being reviewed by various stakeholders, including the GBA. Two years in the making, the plan hopes to ensure the long-term survival of a self-sustaining grizzly bear population in Alberta. Currently, there are about 700 grizzlies in Alberta, including about 185 in national parks.
Much of the GBA’s work focuses on how to reduce human-caused grizzly bear mortality in the Banff-Bow Valley because this is the area where the grizzly bear is most vulnerable.
Dr. Tracy Henderson, Program Director with the Grizzly Bear Alliance, believes that the management of the grizzly bear has not been carried out in a way that respects the values of most Albertans. “Too much of the environment has been sacrificed for industrial resource extraction,” she says. In 2002, the Endangered Species Conservation Committee recommended that the grizzly bear be listed as a threatened species and that the hunt be immediately suspended. To date, neither of these recommendations has been implemented.
For more information on the GBA, visit www.grizzlybearalliance.org
Since the early 1980s, Anadarko Canada Corporation has been active in the Great Sandhills, a 120,000-hectare postglacial desert surrounded by prairie in southwestern Saskatchewan and home to one of the largest set of active sand dunes in Canada. Anadarko’s shallow gas development project is known as the Crane Lake North Gas Field.
This is a very environmentally sensitive area because the soil is sandy, and the active dunes are naturally unstable. Bearing this in mind, Anadarko devised an environmental protection plan, and the first phase was initiated last winter. It included:
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Mainly pad drilling (drilling several wells from one well site).
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Following the natural contours of the land when building the roads and pipelines.
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Remote pipeline maintenance and telemetry to secure well information, thereby reducing traffic.
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Combining, where possible, the pipelines and roads to make one disturbance rather than two.
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Installing pipelines underneath the dune rather than over them in some select areas.
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Ploughing the pipelines in on native grasslands rather than digging them in. This creates a zipper of relatively modest disturbance, and the grass grows back quickly.
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Implementing restrictions based on wildlife concerns e.g., certain activities not permitted when migratory birds start nesting.
According to Terry Forkheim with Anadarako, these actions raise the bar on environmental performance and sensitivity in this region. One of the challenges they encountered last winter was carrying out work on frozen ground (with the intent to minimize the damage done by driving). Given the unpredictable winter weather, it proved a real challenge to plan around the melting and freezing winter cycles.
As part of the Kananaskis G8 Summit, the federal government committed funding for an Environmental Legacy. One of the legacy projects was the design and construction of two wildlife-crossing structures — one a crossing over the Rundle Canal near the town of Canmore and the other an underpass under the Trans-Canada highway at Deadman’s Flats, along with some fencing along the highway. Both of these structures were completed in November 2004.
As a partner of the G8 Environmental Legacy, the Alberta Ecotrust and others have provided funding for three years to monitor the effectiveness of these crossing structures and fencing. The provincial government’s Sustainable Resource Development department is carrying out the monitoring.
To date, there’s been one year of monitoring, and according to Jon Jorgenson with the provincial government in Canmore, all the structures are being used to varying degrees. He notes that it will take wildlife some time to get used to the new crossings. In an effort to better understand when the crossings are being used, remote cameras are being installed.
Wildlife crossings in the Bow Valley Corridor make wildlife movement easier, connect fragmented habitats, reduce human/wildlife highway fatalities and reduce wildlife habituation. Monitoring helps determine the effectiveness of the crossings and how best to proceed with continuing to improve conditions along the Trans-Canada Highway for wild animals.
For more information, visit www.g8legacy.gc.ca
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