Deep in an isolated greenhouse, Scott Formaniuk searches for trees in a very tiny forest.
He gently brushes aside the branches of some two-year-old lodgepole pines, each about the height of his hand.
"These are coming along quite nicely," he says. He eases one of the roughly 2.6 million saplings in this greenhouse out of its Styrofoam block. Soon, he says, these baby trees will go back to their homes near Grande Prairie to become the forests of tomorrow.
Hundreds of St. Albert residents will plant new trees in celebration of Arbour Day later this month. Many of those baby trees will likely come from this greenhouse complex near Smoky Lake.
People depend on forests, Formaniuk says, and we have to restore what we cut down. "To have healthy people, you have to have clean water and clean air. Forests are nature's filters and allow for that."
Birds and bees for trees
Formaniuk is the silviculture specialist at Coast to Coast Reforestation's Smoky Lake nursery — one of seven the company owns in Alberta. Coast to Coast is the third largest seedling producer in Canada, growing some 50 million trees a year, and supplies most of the trees for Alberta's Arbour Day events.
They grow all kinds of trees here, Formaniuk says, as he walks through a jungle-like greenhouse — spruce, jack, lodgepole, saskatoon, sedge and pin cherry — most of which are used to reclaim forestry or oilsands sites.
All of them start from the same source: a seed, often no bigger than a pen tip.
Peter Murphy knows a thing or two about tree seeds. A retired forestry professor who lives in St. Albert, he wanders out to some of the giant pines in his backyard to give an impromptu lecture.
"Trees are very concerned about inbreeding," he says, so they have separate male and female reproductive organs. Some trees are exclusively male or female, while others have both organs and trigger them at different times.
Spruce and pine feature male and female cones. "The male cones are very small," he says — about the size of your pinkie fingernail — especially compared to the finger-length female cones. In June, the male cones start releasing massive amounts of pollen in hopes that the wind will carry some of it to a female cone. These pollen clouds are so thick in the wild that they're often mistaken for smoke.
Once fertilized, the female cones grow as the seeds within them develop. With spruce, these cones turn brown and open up late in the fall, letting their seed drift on the wind.
Pine has a different strategy, Murphy says — they seal their cones tight with resin and wait for a fire. "It's like a flight recorder on an aircraft." When fire sweeps through a forest, the heat melts the resin and causes the cones to drop their seeds. Those seeds land in soil packed with nutrients liberated by the fire and cleared of competing plants, allowing for rapid germination.
Reproducing nature
Tree nurseries like the one at Smoky Lake replicate these processes on a massive scale.
Seed plant manager Henny Darago chuckles as she digs into a 1,000-litre mega-bag of lodgepole pine cones. She says she started work here about 1983 after a neighbour suggested it as a way to make some extra money. "Surprisingly, I'm still here!" Hundreds of millions of seeds have since passed through her hands.
"These are all cones that have to be processed yet," she says, indicating the rows of pallets stacked with sacks behind her. There are even more cones in the two long sheds nearby. Foresters pluck these cones from trees felled across the province and ship them here for processing. Many of them are from lodgepole pine — the province is stockpiling their seed in response to the recent mountain pine beetle epidemic.
Each sack has a tag indicating the cones' source of origin, Formaniuk notes. Trees are adapted to their local weather and soil conditions, and the government requires all seeds to be replanted in their home forests as a result.
Crews start seed extraction by pouring a sack of cones into a hopper, Darago says. The cones spin through a cage to knock off debris, and then get roasted in a 220 C gas furnace for 1.5 minutes to break their resin seals. A conveyor belt carries the cones to several rotating kilns that bake them at about 60 C for up to three days. The heat causes the cones to open up and release their seed into a container.
Darago grabs a handful of what looks like wood shavings. This is winged seed, she explains, which is seed with a glide-wing attached for better dispersal, and is what initially drops from the cones. The winged seed gets bounced over a screen loaded with rubber balls to filter out more debris before getting dumped into a water-filled mixer. Once the water has loosened the wings, workers drain the mixer and blast the seed with air. As the seed dries, the lighter wings blow off while the rest of the seed falls into a waiting bin.
The seed next goes through a water bath that rinses off any junk left over from previous steps. A series of driers dries the seed down to about five to eight per cent moisture — any higher and it will rot, while any lower and it will die. The dry seed tumbles through a series of baffles and an air-jet, both of which knock lighter, non-viable seeds out of the stream. The remaining seed drops into a bag for storage.
The plant usually processes eight mega-bags of cones per run, Darago says — enough to fill about 48 bathtubs. Eight mega-bags of cones translate into about 80 kilograms of seed — enough to fill eight cake-sized boxes. "Lots of cones to get not very much seed." Volumetrically speaking, a kilogram of lodgepole pine seed can grow into about 250,000 future trees.
The cone scraps will be sold for landscaping. The seed, after some quality control in the lab, goes into the province's temperature-controlled underground vault where it can remain for up to 15 years.
When a customer orders some trees, Formaniuk says, crews remove the required seed from the vault, put it in wet cloth, and store it in a refrigerated room for about 21 days to revive it from hibernation.
The seed is then dumped onto a conveyor belt under a roller studded with vacuum cylinders, Formaniuk says. Each cylinder sucks up a single seed then plops or injects it into a tube of peat moss in a Styrofoam grow-block. Those blocks are put in greenhouses (one species per greenhouse), where they are watered and fertilized by overhead booms. After a few months to a few years the seedlings get poked out of their blocks, inspected, wrapped, boxed and shipped for planting.
Forests for people
The United Nations has declared 2011 as the International Year of Forests. The event is meant to draw attention to sustainable forest management and the links between forests and people.
Forests are home to about 80 per cent of terrestrial biodiversity, according to the UN, and preserve the livelihoods of about 1.6 billion people. Deforestation is responsible for about 20 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions.
The trees grown here at Smoky Lake will help restore natural areas and preserve jobs in forestry, Darago notes. "I come from southern Alberta," she adds, "and we don't have a lot of trees there." By planting trees, farmers there are helping to prevent soil erosion, avert floods and maintain moisture levels for plants.
Watching a forest grow gives Murphy a charge to his day. "Nothing makes me feel better than going out into a young stand and seeing those [young trees] reaching for the sky."
