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THEBACHA/FORT SMITH
Wood Buffalo National Park is famed for its animals – including the creature for which it is named – but Jeff Shatford says there is something else that also makes it a special place.

Jeff Shatford is a biologist specializing in plant ecology with Wood Buffalo National Park. - Paul Bickford/NNSL photo

That's the park's vegetation, said the Wood Buffalo biologist specializing in plant ecology, who noted it is a challenge to have the public recognize the importance of vegetation along with bison and whooping cranes.

"I mean people are drawn to big, furry critters," he said. "The feathers and the fur are really what the public glom onto very quickly."

Shatford said the park protects a lot of vegetation representative of the boreal forest.

In particular, he pointed to two areas of special importance – the wetlands home of the whooping crane nesting area in the NWT section of the park and the Peace-Athabasca Delta in northern Alberta.

"In the Northwest Territories, our wetlands in the whooping crane areas are what allow the whooping cranes to continue being productive and are their last bastion of habitat," he said.

As for the Peace-Athabasca Delta, he noted it is "just phenomenal" from a vegetation perspective.

"It's has such lush vegetation," he said, explaining that's because of rivers flooding into very flat areas and the long daylight hours during the summer growing season.

There are records of a few hundred different species of plants in Wood Buffalo.

Shatford noted the area of the park was covered by glaciers 10,000 years ago, so it has been only recently occupied by vegetation in geological time.

"There are not a lot of species, but they're spread out over a huge, huge area," he said.

Shatford said one of his favourites is the fireweed, which often grows along roads.

"It's just a great plant," he said, noting it can be eaten and attracts insects.

The biologist is not aware of any plant found only in the park and nowhere else in the world.

Shatford, a 49-year-old Saskatchewan native who has a bachelor's degree in biology and a master's degree in conservation biology, has been working in Wood Buffalo for four years.

His work mainly involves collecting and analyzing data.

Shatford noted he started his career as an animal biologist.

"I found that animal behaviour biologists spend most of their time going around measuring plants because they're usually measuring habitat," he said. "So I just became very, very interested in how plants survive."

Some of his work in Wood Buffalo involves monitoring invasive plant species, which are not native to Canada but originally arrived from Europe and Asia as agricultural material.

"Those come in on the road systems," he said. "So even though we have very, very few roads in the park and very, very few roads in the Northwest Territories, the weeds are starting to show up, either on the roads or on the river systems."

Invasive plant species include the Canada thistle, which despite its name is not native to this country, and some clovers.

Shatford also does background work on forest fire planning, such as studying different types of vegetation in terms of the kind of fuel they make for forest fires.

"I enjoy working outside those days that we go out into the park. That's one of the things that drew me into biology," he said. "I really enjoy learning about these very complicated ecosystems, and Wood Buffalo is great because there's such a vast area of natural processes."

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