Nearly a full year after its final results were released, many in the City of Greater Sudbury are still trying to see the forest for the trees in the wake of the Sudbury Soils Study.

One example of the way forward includes a new partnership between Xstrata Nickel and Collège Boréal, which actively seeks to increase regional biodiversity.

Through an undisclosed but still “substantial” donation, the school has put the finishing touches on a pair of high-tech greenhouses, known as the Xstrata Nickel Biodiversity Applied Research Centre, according to Boréal president Denis Hubert.

The climate-controlled facilities will push Boréal’s seedling production from 60,000 to 500,000 per year and up to 3 million within the space of five years, due in part to a signed contract making Boréal Xstrata’s preferred seedling supplier.

“This is a terrific partnership which will allow our students to emerge as strongly knowledgeable about forestry as they work with a dedicated corporate partner,” says Hubert.

“It deepens our already strong experience in the forestry industry, and represents an opportunity to become active partners in mining-related forest remediation and rehabilitation.” 

A 1,500-acre Boréal Experimental Forest has been created under the program. The location will be decided in the coming months as both the college and the company work out the details.

By being able to plan and experiment with new forestry applications with a corporate partner, the move will benefit students from a variety of programs touching on natural resources, forestry and environmental planning, says Hubert. In time, he says geology students will also be able to participate in the experimental project.

Much of the impetus for the move comes from the City of Greater Sudbury’s newly released draft of its Biodiversity Plan, which is a response to the Sudbury Soils Study.

The city document details how reforestation through the region will find the city liming, fertilizing and seeding up to 50-hectares-per year by hand. 

Vale Inco will aerially seed up to 150-hectares-per year.

Other broad elements of the project will include collecting seeds and propagating native plants, seeding lichen onto bare rock, and even developing a blueberry management plan, among many others.

Funding for the project is coming from Xstrata and Vale Inco, which donated a combined $2.25 million to the five-year project. The total will not impact the companies’ funding for their own private regreening efforts throughout the city.

While he’s of the opinion that the biodiversity plan is “wow, good” despite a lack of hard benchmarks for recovery, environmental toxicologist Glen Fox says the Soils Study from which it sprung is flawed.

Fox, who worked for Environment Canada for decades, was commissioned to examine the study for the Community Committee on the Sudbury Soils Study. He says that although the plant life portion was impeccable, the same could not be said for the wildlife portion.

During a November visit to Sudbury’s Laurentian University to discuss his findings, Fox commented on how the study contained little to no impact data on local wildlife.

Public consultations prior to the study identified 13 species of concern, all of which have very diverse diets, making it incredibly time-consuming and challenging to extensively test them all for carcinogens. Instead, 80 per cent of the wildlife data was simply estimated, rather than being based on actual testing.

While these methods are allowable within these kinds of ecological risk assessments, they do not allow for the sort of definitive answer put forth in the study.

Those conducting the analysis should have put their foot down and say they wouldn’t proceed further as their work wouldn’t provide satisfactory results, says Fox.


www.sudburysoilsstudy.com
www.city.greatersudbury.on.ca