This paper describes how knowledge mobilization evolved during a study that assessed a proposed increase in industrial water withdrawals from the Athabasca River in northern Alberta, Canada, and potential impacts on a suite of freshwater semi-aquatic mammals in the broader ecosystem. The oil sands region in northeastern Alberta faces various pressures that require rapid knowledge mobilization and decision making, while still acknowledging ecological sensitivities immediately downstream in the Peace-Athabasca Delta (PAD) in the Wood Buffalo National Park.

Amid climate change, biodiversity loss and food insecurity, there is the growing need to draw synergies between micro-scale environmental processes and practices, and macro-level ecosystem dynamics to facilitate conservation decision-making. Adopting this synergistic approach can improve crop yields and profitability more sustainably, enhance livelihoods and mitigate climate change.

Sustainable forest management activities, such as future crop tree (FCT) release treatments, became part of the REDD+ strategy to avoid carbon emissions from forests. FCT release treatments are intended to achieve increased growth of FCTs by removing competitor trees. This initially leads to a reduction of the forest carbon pool and represents a carbon debt. We estimated that the time it takes for FCTs to offset the carbon debt through increased growth on experimental sites of 10 km² in Belize, Guyana, Suriname, and Trinidad and Tobago.