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The City of Ottawa will plant 602 new butternut trees and 100 new ginseng plants to compensate for the ones being ripped up by the Terry Fox Drive extension, according to a proposed agreement with the provincial Ministry of Natural Resources.
The agreement, recently posted for public comment on the province’s Environmental Registry website, will allow the city to cut down 20 viable, mature butternut trees; transplant six butternut saplings; and relocate three wild ginseng plants, all of which are growing in the road’s right-of-way. Both the ginseng and the butternut are listed as endangered under the province’s 2007 Endangered Species Act.
“Replanting is good, but trying to find the same soil type as what they’re demolishing?” said Cheryl Doran, chair of the Friends of the Greenspace Alliance, which opposes the road project. “It’s kind of sad.”
The $47-million, four-kilometre road will form an arc connecting Kanata Lakes to Morgan’s Grant, cutting through the near-pristine hardwood forest and marshy wetlands of the South March Highlands. Over the next decade, the area inside the arc is slated to be filled with housing, while the area to the north, outside of the arc, will be left as natural habitat.
Bruce Mason, the city’s manager of design and construction for the economic stimulus fund program, said the mitigation measures for the ginseng and butternut will cost about $50,000. That money could come from the $32 million in federal and provincial stimulus spending allocated to the project.
He said the plan is to purchase seedlings from local nurseries and plant them in the spring of 2011. The city will monitor the trees for five years with the goal of having half of them survive.
The three ginseng plants will be taken to a nursery in Delhi, Ont., where they will be allowed to reproduce, then the original plants and 100 of their seedlings will be brought back to Ottawa and planted. The city will monitor the plants for three years, with a target 10-per-cent survival rate.
Don Cuddy, a retired MNR ecologist who worked on ginseng conservation, said the plan could work, but there are many “imponderables.” Ginseng plants are vulnerable to being eaten by deer or picked by poachers who sell them illegally for their medicinal properties.
“The habitat needs to be right. It shouldn’t be too acidic. It has to be forested. It has to be moist, not too dry. It should be in an area that’s inaccessible (to poachers).”
Dan Brunton, an Ottawa ecologist who has studied the South March Highlands extensively, said the true value of the ginseng lies not in the individual plants themselves, but in what they indicate: a rich interior hardwood forest habitat of a kind that is rare in eastern Ontario. Saving the three plants will not change the fact that the Terry Fox Drive extension will wipe out part of the South March Highlands habitat and fragment the rest of it, he said.
“We focus on the species at risk, but what makes the forest really tick are the tiny little things in the soil: it’s the sow bugs, it’s the earth worms,” he said. “The more you fragment it, the more you lose … It’s a natural system that has to be dealt with in its entirety.”
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