[Shaun] Well, thank you.
It's a pleasure to be here, I do love Burlington.
Can't say that I'm looking forward to the drive home though,
(attendees laughing)
with the weather forecast.
But I wanna take a few minutes to talk about this project
that I've been involved with for
probably about three years now.
And in my experience, I've done a lot of work
forest monitoring in Ontario, working with the government,
working in academia, working with industry.
But this is really something different
because it's coming from the community.
And in my experience, it's unique, certainly in Ontario.
And I know Ontario isn't the United States,
but we do have northern hardwoods.
There's a lot of similarities.
So it'd be interesting to see at the end
what your feelings are towards this kind of project
and whether something like this
would have any traction in this region.
I'm the mouthpiece here,
I'm just the guy telling you about it.
but really a lot of people involved in this,
I have a lot of attendees, undergrad, graduate attendees,
working on various projects.
They're the ones who do the nitty gritty stuff,
doing all of the measurements.
I'll just caveat this to say that I will show
some kind of results early, at the end,
but this talk's not really about the results,
it's more about the program itself, how it came to be,
what we do, and what the open aspirations are.
And in that sense, it's these folks here,
the community in Muskoka,
it's about two hours north of Toronto.
I'm actually in Peterborough, Ontario, not Toronto.
It's a little bit closer.
Probably more snow than Toronto's gonna get.
And I also, a big shout out to this guy here, Norm.
Norm Yan, I've known him for quite a long time,
over 25 years.
And he's a fisheries ecologist,
he worked for the Ministry of Environment.
And everything he worked on was water based.
And I've been terrestrial based in the forest,
and I've kinda converted him to a lungfish, I say,
he's kinda coming out of the water
and understanding what we do on the landscape,
what we do on the land actually has implications for water.
And you realize there's now a lot of mitigation efforts
to protect our water systems need land-based solutions.
So it's a lot of fun, a lot of interest.
And then I don't know your backgrounds,
how many of you are academics and you publish a paper
and then you put it away and that's it, done.
It doesn't really have that enjoyment,
that satisfaction, I suppose.
When you're working with community
and they're generally interested,
in many ways, it's more satisfying
than just simply publishing manuscripts.
But what's the issue, why are we doing this?
And it came out of concerns
by the community about falling calcium.
Well, I'll talk about why this project's
related to calcium decline specifically,
I think in context, it can be broadly applied
to any environmental issue, that the same principle.
If you get a cheerleader, someone who's gonna take
a lead role on this, you can kinda make headway.
So this is what they're doing.
We have long term data for water.
Water is a good indicator of the soils.
Water drains through that, it's easier, it's less variable.
And so quite clearly you can see declines in calcium
that have occurred over the past 30 years.
And in soils, what I'm really looking for in soils
a bit more challenging because of that heterogeneity.
And we're trying to look forward
and I know this is a paper by Don Ross
looking at changes in soil chemistry.
And a lot of the loss in calcium were historical
in the sense that they were caused primarily
by a dry deposition leeching base cations.
Deposition has been reduced now so we're starting to see
signs of recovery.
You see a little bit in the poster.
And so just looking at various stands here.
These are the model losses over 150 years,
just focus on calcium here.
So quite a lot of calcium we believe has been lost.
And we can forecast that in terms of just looking at
if we don't do any timber harvesting, any renewal,
we start to see recovery over the next 80 years.
But we don't replace what we've lost.
And if we continue to harvest and remove cations,
then in all likelihood, we will never replace
what we've lost.
So while we produced acid rain,
these soils remain infertile,
and we don't know what the long term potential for recovery
is gonna be in these stands.
So in terms of the wood ash coming,
well, wood ash is a waste product in Ontario.
It's illegal to dump it on the forest.
90% of wood ash that we generate goes to landfill.
So there's a tipping fee, there's a cost in site of that.
And we have this natural fertilizer
that we are just giving away.
We're just throwing away this cost associated with that.
And so the advantage of wood ash over some flat line
is we have many nutrients.
Calcium, magnesium, potassium, phosphorus,
all the major macronutrients are in there, except nitrogen.
Nitrogen, we lose that during volatilization.
So we don't have nitrogen.
We also have very high nitrogen deposition values.
So in some ways, the air pollution has offset that.
Though, even nitrogen now is going down.
So we have a lot of nutrients.
I mean we're talking 30% by weight, in case of calcium,
is what the median value is.
As I said though, it's a waste product in Ontario
and that is because of the metals.
Basically when we burn the ash, metals are left behind.
If we exceed the standards here.
And this one is the CM2 standard
that you cannot actually apply it to land.
And because of that, right now,
part of what we're trying to do here is actually get ash
reclassified in the province.
So while I'm talking about non-industrial wood ash,
because it's community,
and we're not talking about paper mills,
the principle will apply going forward
with two large scale ash producers.
So while it's only small scale in the sense
that we're looking at residential ash generation,
the idea is, if we can change the policy using this program,
then we have opened up the pathway for larger wood ash
in a much larger potential scale.
So it was, you know, it's not me that...
Yes, I was involved, but really the impetus
has come from the friends of Muskoka.
So I'll just walk you through the process for doing this.
So they tracked the watershed throughout.
So they're looking at things like invasive,
they're looking at things like road salt,
they're looking at a suite of things.
They have a list of about 10 to 20 environmental issues.
So in this case, they went, "Okay, calcium decline
is something that we wanna tackle.
As a community organization, what can we do?"
So the first thing is well, what are the knowledge gaps?
What do we need to do to try and tackle this problem,
in this case, calcium decline?
So as part of that, the ash has been dated,
they want know how much calcium is in ash,
how much do we have?
Dosage, because you're trying to restore the nutrients
in lieu of storing kilograms per hectare of soil
were modeled to have been lost.
How much ash do you need to apply?
Because the more ash you apply,
then you're adding more metal.
So it's a trade off, right?
And there's also a cost with transporting this
and applying it in the field.
So there's logistical issues.
So in that sense, what are the risks?
What are the benefits?
We can identify those.
Because it's green engagement while we're now three years
into this project, will the community buy in?
We need ash to do these trials or we can't do it.
So will they do it?
And then we're looking at how do we add it?
Do we do it loose, do it granular, do we homogenize it.
And as approvals as well, as I say, it's a waste product,
how can we circumvent the approval process?
So the community is obviously a charitable state themselves,
so able to apply for certain funds.
So they received an Ontario Trillium Foundation grant,
basically in their office, pay for a coordinator.
A lot of this stuff's done by volunteers,
but also they've got academics involved.
And I'm one of those academics
because one thing academics have have is cheap labor.
We have attendees.
Apologies to any attendees here, it's learning experience.
You gotta get all that.
But ultimately we can do a lot of stuff and we can start to,
you know, work through this, working with the community,
trying to tackle those questions that apply this knowledge
and outreach.
I'm gonna talk about the end, you know, communicating this,
As an academic, as a scientist,
I'm certainly guilty of being poor at that.
We communicate through traditional ways.
We don't necessarily get involved
with the community the way it is.
I'm learning.
And I see the benefits of that.
They branded it, they call it ASHMuskoka.
They have a few goals here. They want to generate public.
I did have my very first MA student work on this project,
and it was really to interview stakeholders, government,
public, and forest industry as well.
But also really why are we doing this? What is that?
And a lot of it is they realize that
it's an education piece.
Like people feel more connected to their environment
by getting involved in this.
They don't read the papers,
but they can go to these meetings and get involved,
and feel like they're actually doing something meaningful.
It is Canada's first program, maybe, here as well.
I'm not aware of anything similar in the US
I may be corrected.
And obviously the science based is coming into
more getting into nitty integrated, the details,
if you're gonna do this, how much, where do we do that,
what's the benefits, what's the risk, et cetera.
So they were very thoughtful about their branding
and got all these great little things that they do,
which is really, really cool.
And it really is working.
I mean the public,
they've had literally thousands of people
who've donated ash.
They get these large trash cans.
They get ash from various sources.
They come and donate it to a center.
And then the idea is that this ash is then stored
and with the view of ultimately
as we gather the information to assure it's safe to do so,
we'll start adding it to forest in various trials
that we were setting up
to see what the benefits and arms are doing.
So the public have bought in,
they bring it to these transfer stations here.
Norm Yan again is very involved; he's very photogenic.
He likes to get his photograph taken.
You will not see me in any photographs.
But they get these local stations.
So the ash drives, every periodically.
There are certain community members who come in
and donate ash periodically,
every month or so they might come in.
"Here's my ash, brother."
But they do have throughout the year, these ash drives
on a Saturday and it really does get,
they collect thousands of tons of ash.
They get very dirty in doing this.
They do a loose screening, because the reality of it is,
it is not a controlled experiment in the sense
we're taking what they've got.
And of course people burn a variety of things.
So all we can really do is screen it for loose materials.
And one thing we really need to do is assess
the durability in this ash,
how variable is it?
If we're going to try and regulate it.
If it's inconsistent in its chemical composition,
it's gonna be very hard to get it regulated.
So then we go out, once we've got this ash,
we go out and we apply it to the field.
I say I'm not gonna talk too much about results and science,
but we have a number of trials in sugar bushes
at a place called Big Camp Canoe.
We're looking at dosage,
we're measuring a whole variety of ecosystem responses
from tree growth, soil aspiration, microbial communities,
soil chemistry, tree nutrition, seeding regeneration,
a whole bunch of things that we're hoping
will give us insight into what the application of ash
does to our forests.
These are just some the attendees getting at out.
One thing, what the one challenge that we have,
of course, is we get individual buckets of ash
or garbage pails of ash,
and we wanna try not homogenize it.
So right now we have a massive kind of cement mixer,
and we get the ash and we try and--
We may get five or six or seven batches
that we homogenize to put in.
But what it does mean is that when we go from side to side,
that the ash may not be exactly the same
because we use these 10 buckets for this side,
we use these 15 for this side.
So again, really trying to understand how variable
and consistent the ash is
is going to be very important for approvals processes.
So this is looking at individual samples here.
Bunch of metals, cadmium, nickel, zinc,
lead, arsenic, chromium.
The one thing that we found with the ashes,
this is just distribution of all the individual samples.
These are not the homogenized samples.
So these are individual,
an individual sample will never get applied to a stand,
just one barrel.
It always gets homogenized.
So this kind of worst case scenario,
and we're just interested, you know,
does any sample exceed the CM2 regulation.
This purple line here is really what we we're asking.
And by and large, we don't.
The mean median metal levels,
the regulated metals, are well below the CM2.
They're actually lower than industrial ash
based on comparative literature.
They're always got one sample for certain metals, right?
What we will see, and we need to look into them.
Was that a nail?
Was it something unusual?
Because ultimately we have to make sure that we're always
below these regulations.
But it does seem that by and large,
our ash is relatively low in metal concentration
and basically good.
What does it do to the stands?
So just to finish off with some few little slides
of what we're doing.
We have the preapplication,
we have the post application,
and in this case, we're looking at control plots,
four tons, eight tone per hectare.
So we've got the--
I use a different soil classification system.
Being Canada, we have the LFH.
The A horizon and the B horizon here.
Bottom line is when you add ash,
the pH, not surprisingly, increases by two pH units,
four, eight tons in the L and the FH horizon.
We don't see anything in the mineral soil horizon initially.
So this is just after 12 months.
Both the metals are there as well, right?
So this is cadmium. That's in there.
So same L, the litter, the FH, and the mineral horizon.
Basically all the metals are restricted to the litter.
And if you look at the picture here,
it's basically the ashes.
It's just laying on the leaves.
It's there, and cadmium that's in the ash
will countermeasure in the litter.
It doesn't actually go down into the soil profile
or didn't after a year.
In terms of tree nutrition,
we're looking at things like that.
The one that was most responsive was potassium.
And that's the thing that we've seen
in all our wood trials of the base cations.
So why would this all come about to address calcium decline?
Calcium is less mobile than potassium
less soluble than ash.
Potassium is the first base cation that responds.
And actually potassium is the only one we see
the increase in the mineral horizon
compared to calcium magnesium.
But we start to see both immature and sapling trees
at some sites.
We have three different stands here,
Brook, Wilf, and Mark different stands.
These are post obligation.
We do see increases folic potassium.
So there are effects on tree nutrition.
Thought I put this one in because I'm in Vermont
and everyone wants a sugar maple.
And obviously that's the question, right?
If we're adding ash,
we've got metals and these are sugar bushes
and one of the main products is maple syrup.
We have a lot of maple syrup up in Ontario
but not as much as Vermont.
We want to see what what it does.
We had treated plots
and treated plots here.
After our first year, what we found
is when we actually had a lot more volume
for some reason and the second year,
it was kind of more or less the same.
I don't know why that happened.
The real question is how did it affect chemistry?
I had a lot of numbers here just just to show you
that we are measuring a whole bunch of things.
We didn't see any change in sweetness.
So that wasn't a dilution factor.
When we got more volume, it wasn't a change in sweetness.
We do see some small differences in chemistry,
but really nothing that is a concern.
It wasn't like we were seeing
increases in metal concentration.
There's not really literature database out there
for us to compare sap to call it.
But if we allow for concentration during dilution,
we're nowhere near or we're well within the range of values
that you'll see in the literature.
So it's not like we're adversely affecting the chemistry.
So what we, based on the two years we have,
it's safe for for sap producers.
So we don't see or anticipate any concerns there.
Ultimately we're doing, you know, we have band geometers,
we're looking at small scale tree growth.
I saw soil aspiration.
We have community.
So I have a student who's getting citizens
doing measurements.
What we're asking ourselves is how reliable
those data.
So then we follow them afterwards, kinda.
And then we redo the measurements and we plot,
we compare their values versus our values.
Unsurprisingly,
things that are relatively easy to measure,
they do a great job.
Some things are more difficult,
it's not very reliable.
So we're also involved in communities,
things like that,
so that they get some experience,
and use that and providing insight into what
kind of date are useful and and what are not.
We do outreach in two ways.
We have these documents,
these guides that are meant to serve as indicators
and obviously the peer review literature is academic,
we still have to do it.
So a recent review that's impressed right now we,
we've put together that talks about ash amendments are
for hardwood forest.
If you look at my name or Kim,
you'll see that environmental reviews.
And with that, thank you.
(audience applauding)
[Audience Member 1] I have a question
about the heavy metal concentrations.
Now is that something that is naturally present in the wood
or is that only from contamination?
No, it's naturally present
and certain species like yellow birch and white birch,
for some reason I don't know,
naturally have high levels of zinc and cadmium.
If I were to recommend--
So I've done studies looking at metals in foliage and wood,
various tree species
and there's a lot of variability among tree species.
So you'll have 10 times more,
if you burn a lot of yellow birch,
you're gonna have a lot of cadmium and zinc in the ash.
And also the more acidic the soil that they're grown in,
the higher than, of several metals,
you're gonna have higher metals.
So most of it is coming from that.
Some maybe also coming from the fact that
you're using steel chains or whatever
and all the debris in that.
But most of it is coming probably from the ash.
If you back calculate,
it's consistent with tree values.
[Audience Member 1] So what's the rationale
for the regulations then?
Because if that wood were to just decay
naturally in the forest,
isn't it all gonna end up
back on the forest floor anyways, so?
Yes, that's exactly, exactly right.
I don't make the policy, right?
(attendees chuckle)
And that's what we're trying to educate,
it's, you know, a lot.
There is no real policy for what ash is,
it's about soil amendments.
So we are captured under that guise,
as opposed to an ash.
So that's the problem.
I can't say this,
it looks like we are going about the policy,
it is gonna change regulation to a fertilizer.
That's the goal.
Once we've done that, then I think we're good
and then we can start to scale up.
[Audience Member 1] Okay, thank you. That was good.
[Audience Member 2] What's your underlying bedrock?
This is all Precambrian shields.
So we're looking really,
it's all mainly silicate minerals.
I actually have a one of the size,
I'm interested in soil mineralogy in that
even in these slides there are small amounts of calcite
and apatite that provide small amounts of...
And even within a stand, if I was to sample
three, four trees within a stand, I would see difference
in isotope signature reflecting the relative contribution
of these trace minerals.
So while it's overwhelmingly dominated by home plan,
spurs, these trace elements,
trace minerals that are there,
are very hard to actually quantify. You can see
in the foliage based on the strong isotope signature.
[Host] All right, thank you Sean.
(Audience applauds)