Ground-dwelling invertebrates and plants following the application of inverted soil mounding on seismic lines

In northern Alberta, Canada, much of treed boreal peatlands are fragmented by seismic lines – linear disturbances where trees and shrubs are cleared for the exploration of fossil fuel reserves. Seismic lines have been shown to have slow tree regeneration, likely due to the loss of microtopography during the creation of seismic lines. Inverted soil mounding is one of the treatments commonly applied in Alberta to restore seismic lines and to mitigate the use of these corridors by wildlife and humans. In 2018, we assessed the effects of mounding on understory plants and arthropod assemblages, three years after treatment application. We sampled in five mounded and five untreated seismic lines, and in their adjacent treed fens (reference fens) within the Canadian Natural Resources Ltd (CNRL) Kirby South in-situ steam-assisted gravity drainage (SAGD) Plant, in the Athabasca oil sands (55°22'37.2" N, 111°10'3" W) of NW Alberta. Here we provide the species composition at these sites.