Ron Lewko: Environmental Research & Land Reclamation 

Ron Lewko, Environmental Research, Syncrude

I'm Ron Lewko and I look after environmental research at Syncrude and my job is to reclaim the land.

So this whole area was a mining operation about 15 years ago.
It was a 30 meter deep hole right from the top of oil sand right down to the limestone. There was really nothing here.

About 12 years ago we started replacing the over-burdened back into this area, contoured the land, put reclamation soil on it.

After that...we start planting the seedlings in about year two.

We have a standard reclamation prescription on planting of trees and as you can see they're everything from white spruce to poplar. I think we've planted over five million trees and shrubs.

Once reclamation started, nature took over and the wetland took off by itself.

These bulrushes came in naturally.

The willow trees around the lake came in naturally. We've got wildlife in here.

Some of the wetland's wildlife that we've seen is ducks, the sandhill crane but also the macrophytes, the little stuff that sustain it. All the bugs and bacteria that are at the bottom of the food chain to sustain some of the bigger wildlife here.

I'm involved in some of the aboriginal consultation and that's where we get some of the ideas that rat root is very important... they've been telling us for quite a while in the past that LFH was very important to them...meaning that we'd take the top of the forest floor and put that on the final lift of our reclamation and in fact what they said was true, it just took off and we've seen more success in 6 months than in some of our reclamation areas have seen in 2 years.

Even though it's fifteen years old things are taking off. I've got wildlife in here, the bulrushes are going crazy. It's just a nice place to be.