An Ecological Restoration Approach to Biological Inventories: A Case Study in the Collection of a Vegetation Biolayer That Will Inform Restoration Planning

The vegetation biolayer is an essential part of creating a restoration model for post disturbance environments. Despite the documentation of valued ecosystem components such as vegetation during the environmental assessment process in Canada, closure plans for large industrial projects can still lack the details required of a vegetation biolayer on which to build the restoration model. During restoration planning, a re-evaluation of the pre-disturbance vegetation community is then needed in order to properly characterize the attributes of the reference ecosystem. These critical attributes of the vegetation biolayer can include species richness of both the vascular and cryptogam communities, community composition, stand structure, and the documentation of rare and exotic species. This article describes a framework for creating a vegetation biolayer that can meet the needs of both the restoration model and contribute to the vegetation component of an environmental assessment. These steps are: 1) Synthesize existing knowledge; 2) Evaluate existing data and determine goals; 3) Field data collection and identifications; and 4) Analysis and descriptions of community composition. The implementation of this framework is demonstrated through a case study from the Detour Lake mine, where we prepared a vegetation biolayer in 2013 that is augmented with external data. The lack of a well-defined reference state is a limitation of many restoration projects. This study informs restoration practice by developing a clear framework that practitioners of restoration ecology can use when collecting vegetation biolayer data to characterize the reference state and inform the restoration model.