With support from the Muskwa-Kechika Trust Fund as a Seed Grant, Dr. Paul Sanborn carried out a pilot study of soils in relation to prescribed burning in the Northern Rocky Mountains, in collaboration with Perry Grilz, then a Range Officer in the Ministry of Forests. Sanborn and Grilz conducted 3 days of field work in July 2001. Sanborn wanted to test the utility of plant-derived opal (phytoliths) as a soil indicator of vegetation history, in the hope of distinguishing natural grasslands from those created by anthropogenic burning.
The BC Ministry of Forest's EP 1148 Long-term Soil Productivity (LTSP) study addresses two key factors— soil porosity and site organic matter—that potentially limit tree growth and site productivity in the timber-harvesting land base and that can be affected by forestry operations.
With the assistance of the Yukon Geological Survey, Dr. Paul Sanborn was able to visit the terminus of the Klutlan Glacier, a major outlet glacier which originates in the Alaska portion of the St. Elias Mountains. The stagnant terminus has a thick cover of debris, including a large component of White River tephra, providing enough soil material to support a boreal forest. Field work occurred on July 8, 2007, and results were published as:
Sanborn, P. 2010. Soil formation on supraglacial tephra deposits, Klutlan Glacier, Yukon Territory. Canadian Journal of Soil Science 90: 611-618. https://doi.org/10.4141/cjss10042
A comparative study of grassland soils at 3 sites in northwestern BC and southern Yukon was published as:
Sanborn, P. 2010. Topographically controlled grassland soils in the Boreal Cordillera ecozone, northwestern Canada. Canadian Journal of Soil Science 90: 89-101. https://doi.org/10.4141/CJSS09048
This grew out of a field trip with Ministry of Forests range personnel to the Stikine and Tuya River valleys, near Telegraph Creek BC on August 27-28, 2007. (Two pedons were sampled in 2007, BC07-03 and BC07-04, but those results were not included in the paper.)
In August 2008, Dr. Paul Sanborn returned to the Stikine to sample pedon BC08-06, after field work in Yukon which collected the other two pedons used in the paper, from near Carmacks (Y08-39) and Kluane Lake (Y08-41). (An additional pedon from Kluane, Y08-43, was sampled and analyzed, but it was from a forested site and was not included in the paper.)