Nature Conservancy of Canada acquires peatland property in eastern Manitoba
The 78-hectare parcel was donated to the conservancy by Winnipeg family
The Nature Conservancy of Canada is taking on another piece of property in Manitoba in its efforts to preserve wetlands.
The conservancy announced last week that it has acquired a 78-hectare piece of land just east of Ste. Rita, Man., a community about 60 kilometres east of Winnipeg along Highway 15.
The property was donated to the conservancy by the Rosenburg family of Winnipeg, who held the land in their name for 40 years, according to area manager Tim Teetaert.
However, what makes the Ste. Rita property unique in this area is that it is highly sought after peatland — the same sort of peat you can buy at your local garden centre.
Untouched wetland is increasingly under threat in Canada, Teetaert says.
"Wetlands are one of those habitats that we are losing," Teetaert told CBC News in an interview at the property last week.
Bordered by farmland to the west and the Aggasiz provincial forest to the east, the Ste. Rita site is home to a variety of plant and animal species along Hazel Creek, which drains into Lake Winnipeg.
Teetaert said it is part of the conservancy's efforts to save wetlands and peatland.
"Within Canada, we've lost about 70 per cent of wetlands in the southern portion of the country, where the population lives," he said, adding that wetlands have been paved over, ploughed under or otherwise destroyed.
At 78 hectares, the property is a little smaller than the area of Osborne Village in Winnipeg — a drop in the bucket considering the nature conservancy looks after some 10,000 hectares of wetland in Manitoba alone.
Fighting climate change
However, the impact peatland like this has in the fight against climate change and severe weather events is far reaching. It acts as one of nature's sponges, holding in and storing large amounts of water and carbon, an expert says.
"Peatland, despite covering three per cent of the Earth's surface, stores twice as much carbon as all of the world's forests combined," said Pete Whittington, chair of the department of geography and environment at Brandon University who has studied peatland preservation and restoration extensively. "They are an enormously dense carbon store."
Peatland has the ability to hold in and store a vast amount of excess moisture, increasingly important with the frequency and changing nature of severe weather events on the prairies.
Peat extraction in Canada
However, Whittington says, there is a balance to find between the jobs that come with peat extraction, and the preservation of a natural resource.
"We live in a resource-based economy and a lot of these peatlands [mean] good, high paying jobs in rural towns … so there's economic factors in it," Whittington said.
While peat extraction still happens in Canada, Whittington says, it isn't nearly as much of a problem as it is elsewhere in the world: Some European countries have extracted nearly all of their peatlands.
In Canada, home to about one quarter of the world's wetlands covering 15 per cent of our country's landmass, we have extracted .03 per cent, he says.
"There's always a balance right: people, economy and nature," Teetaert said.
The nature conservancy will inventory the plant and animal life on the Ste. Rita property land in the spring, he says, and that will help determine how the land will be managed.
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