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Seismic lines are linear features created by the oil and gas industry for energy exploration. Though individually narrow, collectively seismic lines are a pervasive management challenge, resulting in changes to biogeochemical cycles, plant and animal abundance and behaviour, predator–prey relationships, and forest successional trajectories. These impacts arise from historical construction methods that used bulldozers to remove vegetation and substrate leaving lines as persistent openings in a state of arrested succession. In the mid-1990s, "low-impact seismic" (LIS) line construction began, using mulchers to remove vegetation aboveground to minimize impacts and hasten reforestation. Here, we evaluated the effectiveness of LIS in retention, recruitment, and growth of seedlings in forested peatlands in northeast British Columbia. Retained and recruited trees on LIS lines were found at 69% and 64% of sites, had mean densities of 3400 and 6000 stems/ha, and mean heights of 42 and 11 cm, respectively. These LIS lines appeared to recover along expected trajectories toward tree cover, thereby mitigating challenges typical of older seismic exploration. Our results suggest it is feasible to further fast-forward line recovery by ensuring mulcher drums are kept as high as possible to increase the number and height of trees through the mulching process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The world's forests are highly fragmented by linear disturbances, and many forests have failed to recover decades after abandonment. Lack of recovery is common in unproductive forests, such as treed peatlands, because of conditions that limit tree growth, including simplification of microtopography (loss of microsites). The persistence of these features affects biodiversity, but of particular concern in Canada is the detrimental effects on threatened woodland caribou. Although natural regeneration of trees in peatlands occurs in some places, it is not an effective recovery strategy for restoring the habitat of woodland caribou. This has led to restoration activities with costs exceeding CAD$12 500/km. However, current restoration does not consider wildfires, which can destroy planted trees but also initiate early seral conditions that favor natural regeneration. Here we compared tree regeneration on seismic lines and adjacent forest controls for burnt (75 sites) and unburnt (68 sites) treed peatlands in northeast Alberta, Canada. Tree regeneration (stems with a DBH < 1 cm/ha) varied from 28 500 in burnt lines, 11 440 in unburnt lines, and 18 210 in burnt forest, to 9520 in unburnt forest. Wildfires promoted denser regeneration in sites with a greater proportion of serotinous species and water table depth. Microtopography and terrain wetness explained regeneration on burnt lines, but not unburnt lines. In burnt and unburnt lines, sunlight, microtopography, and depth of water table most affected tree regeneration patterns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]