Soil Bioengineering

Soil bioengineering uses live plant materials to provide erosion control, slope and stream bank stabilization, landscape restoration, wildlife habitat, biodiversity support, and carbon sequestration. Soil bioengineering techniques can build resilience into a watershed, while minimizing costs and efforts to control erosion.

The use of plant material to stabilize slopes provides an economical, low maintenance, and aesthetically pleasing method of stabilizing slopes, while promoting successional reclamation of disturbed sites. Bioengineering also leverages the process of transpiration to move water out of wet / waterlogged soils and into the atmosphere, mitigating the risk of slope movement due to high soil moisture.

The key to bioengineering is the use of woody vegetation (trees and shrubs) for stormwater and erosion control. Woody vegetation presents many benefits including:

• Deep roots that promote water infiltration and reduce runoff• Absorption of rain from saturated ground that is prone to slumping• Root systems that reinforce soil strength• Leaves that intercept raindrops thus reducing surface erosion• Visually aesthetic erosion control solutions• Low maintenance• Self sustaining, and self-repairing• Mitigation of climate change by sequestering carbon and improving biodiversity
 
  • Melanie Piorecky

    Melanie Piorecky P.Ag.

    Senior Ecologist, Restoration and Reclamation Lead

    • We live in a finite world. The challenge is to have an ecologically functioning world- with us in it. To find a balance between development and nature, expertise in planning before and reclaiming after development are essential.
    • I love to dance, and have danced Bharatanatyam [classical Indian dance] for the last 15 years, in Vernon, Calgary, Vancouver and India.  I also love being a mom, riding horses, and hiking, canoeing, skiing or biking in the big, beautiful world. 
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