Location: Offsite - buses and meeting spot, Parker Building, Laurentian Main campus

Please report 15 minutes prior to your scheduled departure to the OAA Dispatch Hub located next to Registration in the R.D. Parker Building

3.5 ConEd Learning Hours
1:00 p.m. – 4:30 p.m.

This experiential tour starts on a typical Sudbury barren hill, representing the outcome from more than a hundred years of ore extraction and smelting. We then move to a section having received the application of the Sudbury Regreening Program, as we walk through the pine trees, over 10 m tall. This allows us to discern the positive environmental impacts of the program that has treated this hill from 1981 onward.

At Dynamic Earth, we will explore the aesthetic changes in the urban landscape as we look across the green Sudbury landscape, mixed with houses and urban infrastructure. In the Lake Laurentian Conservation Area, we will take an informed walk from the BioSki Cottage to the Nature Chalet, considering the biodiverse architectural complexity of a maturing forest and implications for living with nature.

Learning Objectives
1. Witness the change at the microscale by applying the “Sudbury restoration recipe.”
2. Appreciate the urban regeneration at the landscape level across Sudbury.
3. Understand the dynamics in a changing forest and the need to consider Nature’s diversity in design.
4. Consider the climate change implications of restoring the Sudbury landscape.

Dr. Peter Beckett has spent a lifetime (over 40 years) as a restoration and wetland ecologist at Laurentian University in Sudbury, where he is now an Emeritus Professor and a Senior Fellow at the Vale Living with Lakes Centre. Peter serves as Chair of VETAC, an Advisory Panel to the City of Greater Sudbury that oversees the local landscape restoration. Peter holds a Noranda Award for "outstanding achievements in reclamation," a Watkin Award for Reclamation from the Canadian Land Reclamation Association, and a Pioneer in Reclamation Award from the American Society of Mining and Reclamation. He is an honorary member of the China Land Reclamation Society and has given numerous invited presentations on the Sudbury landscape restoration worldwide.

Note: A boxed lunch will be provided on this tour.