‘Trees are meant to grow here’: Millions of seedlings planted to bring Interlake forest back from the ashes

Farron Sharp sticks a shovel into the ground as her anchor point to draw a four-metre circumference, then counts how many seedlings are still alive in that circle two years after being planted.

The survival assessment is part of an eight-year-long reforestation project that is bringing together members of seven First Nation communities with federal funding and other partners to build a forest near Devils Lake in Manitoba’s Interlake region. 

“A fully grown forest used to be here and then it became a dead forest…. All of this land was completely black in 2021,” said Sharp, a project manager for Blue-Green Planet Project, a tree-planting company that focuses on sustainability.

“It’s the boreal forest. Trees are meant to grow here.”

The plan is to plant 20 million trees after the area was decimated by a pest and ravaged by a wildfire. The work is being done through a partnership between Blue-Green Planet Project and Nisokapawino Forestry Management, a forest services provider co-owned by Canadian Kraft Paper, a paper mill in The Pas, Man., and Nekoté Limited Partnership, a corporation representing seven Manitoba First Nations.

A wildfire ravaged this part of Manitoba’s Interlake in May 2021, burning around 200,000 hectares north of Homebrook. It stretched out of control over 80 kilometres in length and reached close to 16 kilometres in width before being declared under control in August.

The flames tore through the forest near Devils Lake, Crown land just off Highway 6 in Manitoba’s unorganized 19 Division, which is 323 kilometres northwest of Winnipeg.

It destroyed seedlings that were regenerating a part of the forest that had been decimated by a jack pine budworm infestation. 

Miroslav Stepan, a forestry technician with Nisokapawino, said the province asked the company to salvage black spruce and jack pine tree stands there starting in 2016.

With the help of spiked chains and barrels, Nisokapawino removed moss and wood debris through scarification — a forestry technique to open the ground and prepare the soil to place back the cones in the harvested blocks to release the seeds so trees could start growing again.

“After scarification, the fire happened, and it just burned everything to the ground,” Stepan said.

“Seedlings were already growing there and the fire destroyed them.… It was very sad,” he said. “We lost years of future harvesting in that area.”

The area lost any viable seeds and was deemed slow to naturally regenerate after the fire, Stepan said.

Without planting, it would have taken years for the first seedlings from another “pioneer species” like birch or aspen trees to prepare the ground for pine and spruce, he said. The whole process would have taken decades.

Planting for carbon capture

Nearly 1.3 million hectares of Manitoba land burned in 460 wildfires during 2021, Manitoba government statistics say. It was the most land burned in a wildfire season in Manitoba since 1994.

“It is devastating,” Sharp said. 

Re-establishing the Devils Lake forest is also work toward preventing wildfires caused by climate change, she said, because trees store carbon.

“There are no plans for these trees.… They’re literally just planted for the purpose of carbon capture,” Sharp said.

“We are trying to have a global impact.” 

A step forward in reconciliation

The reforestation project started in spring 2022 with work by members of Opaskwayak Cree Nation, one of the seven Manitoba First Nations in the Nekoté partnership.

“The biggest part of this is the reconciliation,” said Floyd North, a liaison between Nekoté and Canadian Kraft Paper. 

First Nations used to play “very little role” in decision making and sustainable management of forests, he said, despite the fact many restoration and forestry projects happened on their lands.

First Nations always wanted to be involved in decision-making and sustainable forest management committees, and engage government on revenue sharing and forestry projects, he said.

“We always wanted to be part of the forest industry,” he said.

“But it took almost 150 years.”

The reforestation project in Devils Lake is bringing First Nations “into the game,” he said, teaching members how planting works and how the forest can thrive — in hopes they can lead future reforestation projects.

“To be trained, to gain the capacity to be good planters, to understand what has to be done in order for trees to have a high survival rate … it gives a community employment,” North said.

Twelve people from Opaskwayak First Nations joined the reforestation project in 2022, while 10 more people from other First Nations involved in the Nekoté partnership were hired in 2023, and seven more joined in 2024. 

The groups trained during the winter, gearing up to plant thousands of seedlings alongside other tree planters in spring.

The reforestation project is a “good example of what other provinces can do when trying to improve reconciliation with First Nations,” North said.

Regeneration ‘unbelievable’

Roughly 2.8 million seedlings have been planted over 1,300 hectares so far, Sharp said. Last spring, 1.7 million jack pines and 212,000 black spruce trees were planted.

The seedlings come from a controlled environment, known as a nursery station, where the seeds are harvested from the cones and grown for one or two years, Sharp said. Over the winter they are set in a cold storage room where they remain dormant, until they are loaded on trucks that take them to the planting site.

“The ground is quite sandy, and there’s a good amount of drainage, which makes it an ideal place for a jack pine,” she said. 

“We are sitting at around 95 per cent of survival rate,” Sharp said. “The natural regeneration is unbelievable.”

The goal is to have nine stems per plot, with 200 plots in a hectare, for a total of 1,800 seedlings.

The forest is decades away from being established, but North said as seedlings grow into trees, wildlife will also return, making Devils Lake a hunting area once again. 

“There’s not a lot of economic development taking place in the territories, so a lot of people rely on the game from the land to sustain themselves,” he said.

Renewed forest can regenerate after fire

The reforestation project is gearing up to start planting three million seedlings every year starting next spring. 

The group received a boost in federal funding last year — $27.4 million from Canada’s two-billion tree program, a road map to restore the country’s canopy by rehabilitating forests, with financial support allocated to organizations and governments to plant trees over 10 years.

The project is 75 per cent funded by the federal government, Sharp said. Other groups have also helped, but the project is still looking for more funding partners.

“It costs a lot of money to [plant] trees,” she said.

North said intentionally planting after a wildfire accelerates the regeneration process and helps with carbon storage. 

“If you didn’t replant, we’d be losing the battle on climate change,” he said. 

But if a wildfire were to engulf the forest again, both the jack pine and black spruce trees being planted would be able to regenerate, if they have reached maturity. 

Stepan said the cones that hold the seeds from these trees “don’t really start opening” unless they are exposed to high temperatures. 

“The forest usually grows for 80 [to 100 years], and when the fire happens, the cones opens really well because of the heat,” he said. 

“That’s how the boreal forest regenerates naturally.”