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Protecting forest floor in place rather than stripping it off is a better strategy to regenerated temporary drilling pads
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- Author(s) / Creator(s)
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In situ extraction of oil sands reserves requires the production of many temporary exploration drilling pads to assess the bitumen layer. In these operations the forest floor and topsoil can be stripped off, stockpiled and replaced after drilling. As a result, many of these pads are slow to recover native forest vegetation. In this experiment we assessed if the forest floor could be left intact and if it might simply be covered during the drilling operation. We assessed the effectiveness of such protection techniques to regenerate aspen sprouts compared to stripping off and replacing the forest floor, and secondly compared to operational clearcutting.
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- Date created
- 2015-09-01
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- Subjects / Keywords
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- Type of Item
- Research Material