Alberta Agriculture and Rural Development is engaged in delivering a voluntary conservation offset pilot in south-east Alberta in collaboration with industry and landowners. The pilot is being delivered in partnership with Alberta Environment and Sustainable Resource Development, Alberta Conservation Association, Alberta Innovates Technology Futures, University of Calgary and LandWise Inc. The development of conservation and stewardship tools to enable achieving conservation values on private land has been identified as a priority in Alberta's Regional Planning process. This pilot project focusses on the development of a voluntary offset for new industry development impacts on private and publicly owned native prairie within the Dry Mixedgrass Natural Subregion (Brown soil zone) of Alberta. This area is home to a significant number of species at risk. It is proposed that participating companies will offset their development impact by purchasing contracts with private landowners who are willing to convert annually cultivated land into native perennial species consistent with the plant community expected for that parcel. The contracts with farmers, and establishment of the native perennial species, will be managed through a third party as will verification and monitoring to ensure sustainable management and habitat outcomes.  The presentation will focus on the overall collaborative approach including key tools that have been developed as well as the challenges and opportunities of developing and implementing a project of this nature.
Oral presentation and poster titles, abstracts, and authors from the Society for Range Management (SRM) Annual Meetings and Tradeshows, from 2013 forward.