As more and more people visit Montreal’s Mount Royal Park, conservationists are working hard to ensure that indigenous plants, some of them as rare as they are delicate, can go about their green lives without human interference.
More than five million people now visit Montreal’s iconic woodland park each year, a pilgrimage that could easily decimate local plant life were it not for the hard work of people like Antonin St-Jean, the head of conservation at Les Amis de la montagne (Friends of the Mountain), reports CBC News.
Founded in 1986 by a group of local citizens and organizations determined to prevent the “construction of a mammoth telecommunications tower rigged for tourism in the park,” Les Amis now play a central role in protecting the non-human denizens of the park, while also welcoming and supporting its human visitors.
Managing the stream of visitors through the park’s hardy but delicate ecosystem is “an evolving problem,” St-Jean told CBC News.
The struggle to find balance the between human and wildlife needs in urban parks is endemic across Canada, particularly in southern Canada, where high levels of biodiversity intersect with population density, CBC adds.
Home to “90 species of trees and 180 different birds,” Mount Royal Park is also a haven for more than 700 plant species, 10 of which are designated at risk in Quebec. The white trillium is one of these: “It can take up to 10 years for the plant to produce its first bloom, which lasts for around three weeks in early spring,” writes the CBC.
Thanks to the efforts of St-Jean and his team, the white trilliums of Mont Royal, along with other rare beauties like the Canada bloodroot, are now protected by lines of fencing that keep visitors on designated paths.
Other urban parks, such as High Park in Toronto and Stanley Park in Vancouver, have volunteer stewardship groups that are active in maintaining and replanting native species.
New urban parks featuring extensive natural areas are in the works. The federal budget set aside C$36 million in April for a new Ojibway National Urban Park in Windsor, after years of work by the volunteer Friends of Ojibway Prairie. It is the second in a planned network that Parks Canada announced in 2021, with a promise to partner with First Nations on these projects, as Windsor’s Ojibway Park does.
For the latest research on the restorative effects of urban parks on human health and the most beneficial human-wild interfaces in such parks, see this open-access academic study published in the journal Nature in February.
Elsewhere, the United Kingdom is halfway to its goal of “re-naturing” 13,000 hectares (130 square kilometres) of land within its 1,600-square-kilometre South Downs National Park, reports BBC News. Established in 2010, the park stretches for 150 kilometres along the UK’s south coast, 85 kilometres due south of London, and includes the famously biodiverse but highly endangered chalk downlands.
While roughly a quarter of the park consists of undisturbed or previously protected woodlands and ponds that support a diverse web of wildlife, vast swaths of it remain in immediate need of “re-wilding” after many decades of intense agricultural cultivation. The park also includes a number of villages and towns, including the county town of Lewes, population 15,000.
The rewilding work to date has included seeding over 100 hectares with wildflowers, planting almost 50,000 trees, and restoring watersheds, as well as rare habitats like the lowland heath and the chalk grasslands.
