Framing the Need for Applications of Ecological Engineering in Arctic Environments

Abstract The Canadian Arctic has been steadily developing since the late 1970s and in particular, this last decade has begun an ever-steady move toward development. Ongoing natural resource exploration throughout the region has led to increased demand for infrastructure, including roads, housing, and services. In addition, many of the early developments are being decommissioned, specifically military and natural resource extraction areas. As development and human alterations to the landscape continue, there is an ever-increasing need for restoration to revegetate, rehabilitate, and even remediate degraded sites. In this chapter, we reviewed the current applications of ecological engineering principles in the Canadian Arctic, with anecdotes from Alaska and other Arctic localities. We also identify and describe the many barriers to recovery of degraded Arctic systems and how focused efforts using principles of ecological engineering could be used as beneficial management practices to overcome these barriers. Ecological engineering has been primarily represented in revegetation of anthropogenically denuded landscapes, remediation of contaminated soils, and treatment of municipal wastewater. Despite the presence of ecological engineering in the Canadian Arctic over the past decades, its widespread application and evaluation of success on large-scale projects has been limited to only a few case studies. The primary reasons for the low number of examples relate to the remoteness of the majority of the project sites and the harsh climate, which preclude establishing new biological communities and the significant economic cost associated with implementing large projects in the region. Furthermore, compliance of environmental regulations has in many cases been difficult to monitor also because of the factors indicated above.

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