Mid-Canadian Boreal Forests is new ecoregion established in the 2017 ecoregion delineation. It combined parts of the Canadian Aspen Forests and Parkland ecoregion with the Mid-Continental Canadian forests. Most of the ecoregion has a predominance of boreal forest features or jack pine vegetation on sand dunes rather than aspen forests alone. Along the Athabasca River are the Athabasca Oil Sands, which contain an estimated 1.7 trillion barrels of oil, comparable in magnitude to the world’s total proven reserves of conventional petroleum.
In 1911, up to 1,000 black farmers from Oklahoma settled in the Keystone district (N53o9' W114o26'). They left Oklahoma due to passage of Jim Crow laws and were encouraged to come to Alberta by the promise of free land. The settlement dwindled over the years as they also faced discrimination in Alberta. A few black families persist, according to the Breton and District Historical Museum, which maintains the Keystone Cemetery (http://www.village.breton.ab.ca/history.html).
By the 1920s, many immigrant farmers of various backgrounds were trying to grow crops on the gray soils (luvisols) of the boreal forest in the vicinity of Keystone and Breton. This proved a challenge compared to the nearby prairie or grassland soils just to the east and southeast. The University of Alberta responded by establishing the Breton Plots (N53o6' W114o27'). For 100 years, these facilities have been used to study crop rotation, fertilization,and soil treatment in hopes of discovering better ways to farm gray soils. Two major crop rotations studied for this period are wheat-fallow and wheat-oat-barley-hay-hay. The latter has been the most successful. These are the only known continuous, long-term research plots on gray luvisols. The plots are a registered historic resource in Alberta.
