Aspen Health Ground Survey Assessments

Climate change is exacerbating the interplay between disturbances like fire, insect outbreaks, and drought, leading to increasingly disrupted forest ecosystems. Drought is widely recognized as a catalyst for disturbance that can compromise the health of aspen trees. With climate change, drought events are expected to become more frequent and severe. The detrimental impact of drought is amplified when coupled with another disturbance, such as insect defoliation, and the combined effect is often greater than the sum of its parts. The Forest Stewardship and Trade Branch (FSTB) faces the challenge of managing ecosystems in which baseline conditions are shifting. While coarse spatial information on aspen decline and mortality is collected from aerial surveys and monitoring plots, a finer-scale assessment across a broader network of plots is necessary to fully understand the trajectory of declining aspen stands. This project is intended to conduct assessments across the Alberta boreal plains region during the summer of 2024. The goal of this project is to gain a better understanding of the conditions in these stands to support the future of Alberta's sustainable forest management. The project will gather data in healthy and declining aspen stands over three regions of Alberta (Peace River, Grande Prairie, and Lac La Biche) using GOA’s Aspen Risk Tool, built to help identify aspen stands that are at risk of declining. The Aspen Risk Tool survey procedure will be used to assess 1) live and dead basal area of aspen trees, 2) information on the presence of a subset of aspen pest agents that specifically indicate future mortality, 3) regeneration, and 4) course woody debris. This data will provide information on the health and productivity of aspen stands, enhance growth and yield modeling, and support sustainable forest management planning.