NCC: Land Lines – By seed and saw

April 4, 2025 | by Jensen Edwards

Ensuring the future of resilient forests with the best conservation tools suited for each region

Delaney Schlemko stands as a giant in a forest, peering down across the thousands of treetops she’s helping to steward. She’s careful not to crush the woody stems of native species like white spruce, lodgepole pine and black spruce underfoot as she strides through the landscape. These trees are precious, delicate, and knee-height, but are a forest nonetheless.

Planted by non-profit organization Project Forest throughout a 55-hectare field at the Golden Ranches Conservation Area, southeast of Edmonton, the 110,000 saplings Schlemko oversees are competing for sun and soil with invasive species that have become common across the region.

But as their branches reach wider and their roots drive deeper, these trees at Golden Ranches are reasserting their role in Alberta’s Beaver Hills landscape. and by saw “Forests are an important piece of the landscape puzzle here,” says Schlemko, the Nature Conservancy of Canada’s (NCC’s) natural area manager for northeast Alberta. Among their countless services, the area’s forests offer shelter for species and recreation for residents. They also serve as the meeting point between Alberta’s southern aspen parkland and its boreal forest in the north.

Sandwiched between suburban Edmonton and agricultural landscapes, the Beaver Hills region faces significant pressures from urban sprawl, land conversion and drought. Between 2015 and 2020, for instance, native forest loss here accounted for nearly half of all land cover change. And with each tree lost, the Beaver Hills loses so much more than a plant. Whether it’s for livelihoods in forestry and forest products, for cultural connections or for the recreation opportunities they offer and the clean air they provide, forests support life.

And just as humans rely on these ecosystems for a rich array of benefits, forests themselves depend on the actions of their human neighbours. But increasingly erratic weather events, moisture levels and our own past misconceptions about “wilderness” and the perceptions that humans were separate from nature now threaten this symbiotic relationship and the resilience of our communities and landscapes. That’s why NCC is working with many partners to restore the balance in forests across the country.

Building resiliency with saws and flame

Planting trees is not a one-size-fits-all solution to forest resilience. Nature’s not that simple. To choose the best conservation tool, NCC assesses the history of a given landscape, along with the changes it has been subjected to. It’s essential that we adapt our approach on each property to ensure that our actions there have the maximum impact across the landscape if we’re to reach our ultimate goal: a future where nature and people thrive together.

Take, for example, the Rocky Mountain Trench. Before European settlement, the landscapes in British Columbia’s southeast corner looked more like open savannahs than the densely packed conifer forests found here today. This is in part because these places were burned regularly, lit as a part of First Nations land stewardship and by lightning strikes. The fires, frequent but low in intensity, rejuvenated the land and left only the most fire-resistant mature trees, maintaining a thriving, open grassland and shrub understory.

But nearly two centuries of colonial fire suppression policies have transformed the landscape into one that is now prone to wild, uncontrollable infernos that burn hot, long and often close to communities. These blazes torch dry and drought-ridden landscapes, threatening the ecosystems and communities of the Rocky Mountain Trench with severe destruction. Here and across the continent, communities, industry, governments and conservation groups like NCC are now recognizing what local Indigenous Nations and communities have known all along but were for so long banned from acting on: sometimes, forests need fire to thrive.

In the same way that cleaning your house regularly is much more manageable than letting the dust and dishes accumulate between each spring cleaning, the ponderosa pine and Douglas-fir forests in the Rocky Mountain Trench are best managed through regular maintenance — including low-intensity wildfires or, where this isn’t yet possible, what experts call “forest thinning.”

By saw and by fire, NCC and its partners are using forest thinning at NCC’s Kootenay River Ranch Conservation Area and elsewhere in the region to replicate the impacts that fires and pest infestations once had on the landscape: clearing debris, opening up space in the forest, killing off most of the regenerating or juvenile trees, creating dying, dead and decaying trees that offer diverse habitat to local wildlife. While thinning by hand is precise, it is also time-consuming. That’s why NCC and others are embracing more natural solutions, like fire.

Prescribed burns are intensely planned and purposefully lit fires, designed to replicate the impacts low-intensity burns once had on the landscape. These exercises are monitored closely by land managers, with the support of contract firefighters, the BC Wildfire Service and other experts, and they are challenging to pull off. In the Rocky Mountain Trench, there are only six to 10 days every year that offer favourable conditions to conduct a burn, and even on those days, plans can quickly change. Last year, NCC and the BC Wildfire Service had to snuff out a prescribed burn at Kootenay River Ranch after a wind shift prevented further burning. Nevertheless, the planning and the waiting can lead to impressive results.

Shortly after they burn out, prescribed burns in the Rocky Mountain Trench reveal their impact. Pockets of seedlings emerge, while areas nearby that first appear charred soon have opportunistic flowers poke their way through the black soils, mere weeks afterwards. Saskatoons and antelope bitterbrush resprout from their root collars, offering high-nutrient food to foraging elk, deer and bighorn sheep. Newly dead and decaying trees offer cozy homes for bugs and birds like Williamson’s sapsucker and Lewis’ woodpecker, two at-risk species in the area. Life quickly returns.

For locals, forest thinning and prescribed burning can also mean safety, because it reduces fuel loads near their communities. Typically, fires that do ignite in restored areas burn on the ground at lower intensity, and are less likely to jump roads, rivers and open spaces to reach human infrastructure. Forest thinning supports jobs, too. Local contract crews are hired for prescribed burns, and selective logging provides material that can either be processed by local mills or burned for heating during cold winters. Beyond NCC, other local land managers in the Rocky Mountain Trench, including the Ktunaxa Nation and timber rights holders, are also thinning their forests. While each group may see their own upsides through the perspectives they bring to the work, their efforts ultimately benefit all life in the Rocky Mountain Trench.

“I think people are seeing that more and more, with the way we’re impacted by things like natural disasters and disturbances in the environment, we need to understand our role in those events and strike a balance between what is good for people and what is good for the ecosystem as a whole,” Hermanson says.

People play a role in forests’ resiliency

“We used to believe that we could put a boundary around something and walk away from it and it would last as is, in perpetuity,” says Kate Lindsay, biologist and vice-president of sustainability for the Forest Products Association of Canada (FPAC). “As if you could put a glass dome over something and then it will stay the way it was forever. That’s not reality.”

Forests, and the role they play in all our lives, cannot just be considered as separate from us. Instead, Lindsay and many others in the conservation and forestry sectors, have come to recognize that “it’s really not about removing humans from an ecosystem,” she says. “Instead, let’s look at how humans form a part of that ecosystem.” Forests underpin many local economies, from British Columbia to the Maritimes, and Lindsay knows FPAC members have a vested interest in their conservation. “We play a role of ensuring the long-term sustainability of the industry and all of the forests’ ecosystem functions, too,” she says.

That’s why NCC works with Lindsay and her peers in the forestry industry to enable and encourage effective conservation actions. As she puts it, this “helps grow the tent of people that consider themselves champions for conservation,” so that foresters and other land users and managers will better understand the impacts of their work on ecosystems, communities and the future. Showing them how they can do their work for the benefit of nature and communities leads to a proud and engaged community of people, recognizing the positive impacts they can have on nature and each other.

Back in the Beaver Hills, this recognition is already well-known. In 2016, the area was designated an official Biosphere Reserve by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). Biospheres (there are 19 in Canada) are meant to recognize places “where people are living in harmony with the environment,” according to UNESCO. The designation also recognizes that conservation and biodiversity are linked to sustainable economic development — that it is possible (and important) for nature and people to benefit each other. The restoration work at Golden Ranches is a prime example.

What was once a field is growing into a forest and expanding habitat connectivity in the heart of the Beaver Hills, thanks to human hands. In turn, that forest will shelter species and help clean the air Schlemko and her neighbours breathe. Insects will also live in that forest and each day make their way to nearby farm fields to pollinate crops, which in turn will feed the people who planted the forest.

And because of Schlemko and her team’s careful planning, the work on the ground here will have an impact that extends across the broader landscape. In this way, to truly see the whole forest is to recognize it’s made up of trees and people (and many other species), and we are all interconnected. Whether we’re removing trees in southeast BC or planting them in the Beaver Hills, NCC is embracing the role we all need to play in ensuring a resilient future for forests and communities alike.