Low extent but high impact of human land use on wetland flora across the boreal oil sands region.

ABSTRACT

Boreal wetlands are at risk of degradation from anthropogenic activities including oil sands energy extraction. Despite efforts to monitor the impacts of oil sands energy extraction-related activities on wetland ecology, few studies examine the impacts of diverse human development types on wetland plant communities. Here, we sought to quantify the effects of human development in the Athabasca, Peace River, and Cold Lake Oil Sands Regions in Alberta, Canada, and to examine its impact on wetland plant community composition. Across the region, we found that total development and development related to energy and mining were both low; ~80% of the study area was undeveloped. Despite the low spatial extent, total anthropogenic development was negatively correlated with site-level conservatism (a metric of plant tolerance to environmental perturbation) in all five wetland classes examined. This suggests that wetlands surrounded by human development are inhabited by generalist species that are tolerant of environmental disturbance. Moreover, distinct floristic groups within each wetland class could be distinguished based on their total developed area, providing additional evidence that human development affects plant composition and diversity, despite its limited extent in the study area. In contrast to total development, energy and mining development had an inconsistent or no detectable impact on wetland plant community composition at the regional level, likely because although oils sands surface mining is intensive, it is spatially restricted to a small area within the oil sands region. Our findings show that wetland plant communities in the oil sands region are impacted by multiple types of human land use concurrently; further research should aim to evaluate both the distinct impacts of different land use types using gradients of development intensity, as well as the cumulative impacts of multiple land use types happening concurrently.