The 1998 ice storm wreaked havoc on Montreal’s forests. Here’s how they’re doing 25 years later | 24CA News

Éric Richard nonetheless remembers watching in horror as one of many largest pure disasters in Canadian historical past mangled virtually all the things he’d been striving for years to guard. 

Working with a non-profit group devoted to the conservation and preservation of Montreal’s Mount Royal Park, Richard had a entrance row seat to the devastating affect the good ice storm of 1998 left on the mountain’s forest. 

“Some trees had just a few branches that were broken, some had their trunk breaking in two,” he mentioned. Others had slumped over because of the sheer weight of the thick ice that coated their branches. 

In Mount Royal Park, greater than 80 per cent of the bushes — over 85,000 — had been broken to varied levels, with damaged branches littering the forest flooring and others, nonetheless hooked up, threatening to snap at any level. 

The injury resulted in about 5,000 bushes needing to be minimize down. 

“It was a serious threat to the forest,” mentioned Richard, scientific advisor to Les amis de la montagne.

But a era later, following the planting of greater than 30,000 new bushes and the shocking regenerative powers of previous ones, Richard says you would be hard-pressed to seek out clear proof of the storm on woods that had suffered what appeared to be irreparable injury. 

“The resilience of the forest is sometimes surprising us, how it can recover,” he mentioned. “If you look at the forest now, it’s hard to find traces of the ice storm 25 years after.”

Storm modified ecosystem, panorama

While bodily proof of the ice storm, together with bowed trunks and department stubs, would possibly principally be behind us, that does not imply the storm hasn’t formed our city forests or left an imprint on the panorama, in line with Carly Ziter, a biology professor at Concordia University, who specializes in city ecology.

“While we won’t see the impact of the ice storm on individual trees, the ecosystem we have today is different than the one we would have, had we not had that large scale disturbance,” she mentioned. 

For instance, giant bushes that got here down in the course of the ice storm left equally giant gaps within the park’s cover. This produced pockets of daylight that, in flip, created situations for invasive species of bushes to unfold and colonize the realm. 

Native species, just like the ash, additionally flourished in these gaps, however some 9,000 on the mountain have since been minimize down after turning into infested by the tiny however harmful emerald ash borer — an invasive beetle that eats ash bushes from the within.

“So this insect [had] a bigger impact than the ice storm of 1998 on the forest of Mount Royal,” mentioned Richard. 

The peak of the forest was additionally altered by the storm, with bushes planted in subsequent years standing about 10 metres tall now — about half the dimensions of their neighbours. 

Ziter says dropping these giant bushes meant dropping all the advantages that include them, together with off-setting city warmth and air air pollution, in addition to offering areas for recreation and habitats for different animals and bugs. 

“So even though, on the one hand, nature and forests are incredibly resilient and they will regenerate and come back over time, it’s not an easy or a fast process to replace nature when it has been lost,” she mentioned. 

Importance of biodiversity

Experts say the present threats dealing with Montreal’s forests embrace stronger and extra frequent storms attributable to local weather change, together with invasive bugs just like the emerald ash borer.

Benoît Côté, an affiliate professor at McGill University and the director of the Morgan Arboretum and Molson Nature Reserve, says with extra excessive bouts of climate doubtless on the best way, he worries extra in regards to the wind pace than ice accumulation.

“I think the storms are getting more violent … and as soon as you get to [wind gusts of] about 80 to 100 kilometres an hour, trees will go down,” he mentioned. “I’m not too sure what we can do to try to circumvent this problem in the future.” 

Ziter, for her half, says this emphasizes the significance of biodiversity. If city forests are dominated by just some species, which most are, together with in Montreal, that makes them much less resilient to disturbance sooner or later, she mentioned. 

“When we’re planting new trees, there’s much more of a focus on diversity, on planting not only different species, but trees with different functions, different shapes, different types of trees so that we can make sure that our urban forest is more resilient to these kinds of events in the future,” she mentioned. 

A tree that is extra resilient to an ice storm may not be the identical one which’s extra resilient to a drought or an insect outbreak, Ziter mentioned. 

“There is no one perfect tree species that’s going to withstand all of these stressors.”

Richard says there are about 80 completely different species of bushes on Mount Royal and extra than 800 completely different species of vegetation and bushes that develop naturally within the forest. 

Lessons discovered

Despite the destruction brought on by the 1998 storm, specialists say this sort of enormous scale disturbance offers us an opportunity to replicate and take into consideration how we replant, rebuild and develop our city forests sooner or later. 

“We’ve learned a lot of lessons, I think, from the ice storm as well, in terms of not only the resiliency of our urban forest but in how we can manage our trees and our urban forests and recover from these kinds of events,” mentioned Ziter. 

She factors to Quebec foresters, for instance, who took what they thought was the very best plan of action on the time following the ice storm, however may need really additional traumatized bushes.

Richard says the storm gave Montrealers a chance to study extra about how bushes react to phenomena like this and in regards to the fragility of the forest and find out how to enhance its resilience.

“It was an occasion for all the professionals of the forest in Quebec to learn more about which species resist more or can succeed more, and it’s changed the way they choose to plant trees in the streets,” he mentioned. 

Zitar says, having seen how previous occasions form our modern ecosystems and the character round us, Quebec should make combating local weather change a precedence so as to shield our inexperienced areas in opposition to future stressors. 

“We need to get our emissions under control and combat climate change as the root cause of a lot of these disturbances,” she mentioned.