St. Albert has lost about a fifth of its natural areas to development in the last two decades, suggests a new report.
City council approved the St. Albert natural area conservation and management plan and the 2015 update to its natural areas assessment last week without debate.
The reports, which weigh in at about 250 pages total, map out all the forests, wetlands and natural areas in St. Albert and its border areas with Sturgeon County, and describe how the city will work to restore and conserve them.
The inventory identified 350 natural areas in this region. Of these, 193 were in St. Albert, 149 were in Sturgeon County, and eight were in Edmonton.
It found that just 41 per cent of the 230 natural areas identified in the city's first inventory (done in 1999) were still completely intact today. Some 37 per cent of those areas had been destroyed, and another 22 per cent were damaged.
The city lost about 81 hectares or about 20 per cent of its natural land base between 1999 and August 2015, the report shows. Another 19 hectares was projected to disappear under approved development plans after August 2015.
Most of these areas were in what are now developing subdivisions such as Jensen Lakes and Riverside, said city environmental manager Christian Benson.
"It does suck. It's horrible to see the loss of natural areas."
Big Lake Environment Support Society member Miles Constable, who had not yet read the report, said he was not surprised by this statistic when told of it.
"That is simply what happens with urban expansion."
The report notes that some 80 per cent of the natural areas the city had in 1999 are still intact. Just 10 per cent of the area that had been lost was located in the built-up areas of the city.
Protecting the rest
The reports update the city's 2008 natural area conservation plan with a new regional perspective, Benson said.
"Animals and plants don't really take into account our geographical boundaries and our political boundaries," he said. The plan considers St. Albert's natural areas as part of a broader ecological network, with an emphasis on connections in and outside city limits.
"What we do within St. Albert will very much affect what our surrounding municipalities will have to deal with."
The report maps out areas of regional and local ecological importance, such as Big Lake, as well as ecological corridors such as the banks of the Sturgeon and isolated regions that may serve as "stepping stones" for species movement.
The report makes 13 recommendations to improve the city's conservation of natural areas, including close co-operation with Sturgeon County to preserve the greenway along Carrot Creek and higher standards for natural area assessments.
Many of the recommendations call for new ways to protect natural areas from development such as encouraging the use of voluntary easements and donations and creating a fund with which to buy important lands outright.
It also suggests creating a "natural area" land use district that the city could use to zone lands for protection prior to development. The report notes that such zoning may be replaced by the "conservation reserve" zoning proposed by the revised Municipal Government Act (currently before the Alberta Legislature), and that this zoning "would be potentially difficult for the city without the consent of all affected landowners."
Constable said he approved of this concept, as it would both protect the environment and show developers up front the constraints they would have to work with in their plans.
The city will now start rolling out these recommendations, Benson said. One of its next steps will be to complete urban forest inventory next year, which will let it create measureable targets for forest conservation.
The report is available in the agenda package for the Nov. 21 council meeting at stalbert.ca.
