July 14, 2023
Celebrating 10 years with Paragon – thank you Britt, Darcy, Konstantin, Leo, Mel, and Shobhana!
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Blog
May 17, 2023
On May 24, 2023 the Canadian Conservation and Land Management Knowledge Network (CCLM) will be hosting a webinar discussing Nature-based climate solutions (NBCSs) as part of the solution in reducing Canada’s GHG emissions.
More information here:
May 11, 2023
Hello friends of soil, we would like to remind you that the Pedology Field School is coming close, and registration is still open!
We are only two weeks away from the Pedology Field School (SOIL230).
If you are interested, get the details and your tickets here: https://www.eventbrite.ca/o/paragon-soil-and-environmental-consulting-inc-32323156269
May 9, 2023
The Department of Renewable Resources at the University of Alberta is offering a 3-day workshop in moss identification from May 17-19, which includes a short field visit to the river valley.
Click on this link for more information:
An Introduction to Mosses of Alberta – Wed, May 17, 2023 – Fri, May 19, 2023 (groupize.com)
May 5, 2023
Fun Fact: Farmers in England used to threaten poorly producing apple trees with violence to encourage them to bear fruit.
If the threat didn’t work, the tree would be shot the following year. Completely coincidently, this total overreaction often worked by relieving a tight, inhibiting bark.
If violence isn’t a-peel-ing to you (against your core values?), you could try dressing your tree in ladies’ clothes instead. In Germany, orchardists saw a tree that wasn’t producing as male and dressed it in petticoats to encourage a change to “fruitful femininity”. Alternatively, a poorly producing “male” tree could be tied to a fruitful “female” tree with straw and Christmas sausages, they would be proclaimed to be married and urged to bear fruit.
I hope they lived apple-y ever after.
April 14, 2023
The Alberta Chapter of CLRA will be hosting a virtual and in-person (The Derrick Golf and Winter Club) lunch and learn on April 20, 2023. Jean-Marie Sobze will be speaking about Assessing Post-Harvest Interim Seed Storage Conditions, with the focus on native boreal seeds.
For more details and to sign up, click here: Events — CLRA | ACRSD
February 23, 2023
Fun Fact: Lichens may have been the first farmers on the planet.
The simple lichen Winfrenatia from the Devonian Period (407 million years ago) was made mostly of undifferentiated fungal hyphae arranged as a mat, anchoring it to its growing surface. Scattered throughout this mat, cyanobacterial cells (photobionts) were held in place in tiny pits, like “pigs in a pen”. The fungi fed on the energy the photobionts generated when they were exposed to sunlight. A cross section of Winfrenatia is below (drawing by Falconaumanni from Wikimedia Commons). Just look at those little piggies!
On the spectrum of mutually beneficial interactions, it is difficult to separate the fungi/photobiont relationship from any other form of domestication. Some fungi even resort to rustling – only forming lichens by killing other lichen-forming fungi and stealing their photobionts before settling down as a lichen themselves.
If you’re interested in more reading, see Otherlands, by Thomas Halliday. A great read about natural history… 550,000,000 years of it… I bet he’s a fungi at parties…If I ever meet him, I’ll give him a hyph-ive.
February 21, 2023
Canadian Conservation and Land Management will be offering a free webinar on February 28, 2023 to discuss “The Application of Drone and UAV Technology in Conservation Work”. Click on this link for more information and to register: The application of drone and UAV technology in conservation work Registration, Tue, 28 Feb 2023 at 11:00 AM | Eventbrite
February 16, 2023
We are two weeks away from the first Paragon soil course of the season! Get the details and your tickets here:
https://www.eventbrite.ca/o/paragon-soil-and-environmental-consulting-inc-32323156269
- SOIL220 Introduction to Soil Science (March 4 to 19, 2023)
- SOIL410 Soil Classification (March 29 and 30, 2023)
- SOIL420 Soil Mapping (April 5 and 6, 2023)
- SOIL230 Pedology Field School (May 29 to 31, 2023)
We are looking forward to learning with you!
February 1, 2023
As environmental consultants working with pipeline construction, we often think about the future of the land and its ability to recover. A study done by our own Brittany Flemming and Vince Futoransky, alongside Wade Pruett, has detailed a way to measure restoration success and more specifically, the success of the natural recovery approach. More cost-effective and less labour-intensive, with more diverse results? Read on: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/rec.13749
