City residents are encouraged to hug a tree this week as St. Albert holds its first official celebration of National Forest Week.
National Forest Week is a nationwide event meant to raise awareness of Canada’s forests. It runs from Sept. 20 to 26.
This Saturday’s Fall ParkFest is sort of a kick-off to the celebration, said city community recreation co-ordinator Erin Pickard. One of the Forest Week events – a public planting of 300 trees by TD Canada Trust employees on Sept. 26 – will actually add onto a forest planted along the Sturgeon as part of ParkFest.
The first event of Forest Week proper will be the planting of 80 spruce trees in the Grey Nuns White Spruce Forest on Sunday.
This is part of an ongoing experiment to bring more young trees to the forest, which is dominated by old ones, said retired St. Albert forestry professor Peter Murphy. He and a small group of volunteers will clear five 10-metre-wide circles of brush in the forest and plant about 15 potted trees in each. Tests on similar plots in the forest suggest that keeping these zones clear will give young spruce time to grow, creating replacement trees for the forest.
This project is backed by a $3,000 grant from Fortis, Pickard said.
Father Jan School students will be planting 12 trees in a park near their school on Wednesday, which is National Tree Day, Pickard said. Each class will plant one tree to help naturalize the area and celebrate the school’s theme of “growing together.”
A small group of Sir George Simpson students will join city staffers to plant about 80 milkweed plants at Grandin Pond Friday afternoon, she continued.
“Monarch butterflies have been in decline right now across North America,” Pickard said, and conservationists are encouraging people to plant milkweed to support them.
Monarchs don’t often get this far north, but when they do, they’re picky enough that they’ll only lay their eggs on milkweed, said John “the Nature Nut” Acorn, renewable resources instructor at the University of Alberta.
The butterflies detect milkweed using taste-buds on their feet tuned to the tang of cardiac glycosides, Acorn explained.
“They give whatever eats them kind of a little mild heart attack,” he said, explaining it discourages predation.
Monarch caterpillars eat these plants to pick up these chemicals and make themselves unpleasant to eat.
This will be the city’s first official milkweed planting, and staff are interested in seeing how the plants do, Pickard said.
City residents can take in a free talk on the future of solar power in Alberta next week.
The Solar Energy Society of Alberta has called in John Gorman of the Canadian Solar Industries Association to speak next Wednesday on the state of solar power in Alberta and Canada.
The talk will provide a snapshot of the solar industry in this province and speak on how the recent shift in government could affect it, said Rob Harlan, spokesperson for the solar energy society.
“Alberta has the best solar resource in Canada and has a lot of potential for the industry to develop here,” he said.
The talk starts at 7 p.m. this Sept. 23 in the CN Theatre at MacEwan University. Visit solaralberta.ca for details.
U.S. climate scientists say that 2015 is almost certainly going to be the warmest year in recorded history.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration released its monthly State of the Climate report this week.
The report found that last August was 0.88 C warmer than the 20th century average, making it the warmest August on record. 2015 has also had the warmest February, March, May, June, and July on record.
In a blog post, NOAA researchers estimated that this year was 97 per cent likely to be the warmest in recorded history based on the presence of a strong El Niño event in the Pacific, which typically corresponds to hot conditions, and the fact that the year thus far has been 0.09 C hotter than 2014 (the current record-holder).
The NOAA report can be found at www.ncdc.noaa.gov.
