Growing a Connected Landscape Across the Bruce Trail Corridor

By Aidan O’Brien

The Bruce Trail stretches over 900 kilometres along the Niagara Escarpment, passing through a diverse mix of forests, agricultural lands, and rapidly growing communities. While it is often experienced as a continuous natural corridor, the broader landscape is best understood as a patchwork of protected areas and privately owned lands, where forest habitat is not always fully connected.

The Niagara Escarpment has been a place of significance for Indigenous peoples for thousands of years. Known in Anishinaabemowin as Gchi-Bimadinaa (“The Great Cliff That Runs Along”) and in Kanyen’kehá:ka (Mohawk) as Kastenhraktátye (“Along the Cliffs”), the Escarpment continues to hold deep cultural, spiritual, and ecological importance for the Indigenous peoples who have cared for and maintained relationships with these lands since time immemorial. The forests, waters, plants, and wildlife of the Escarpment are part of a living landscape shaped by generations of Indigenous knowledge, stewardship, and connection to place.

Over the past two decades, Forests Canada has helped restore and reconnect forests along the Bruce Trail corridor in ways that have strengthened wildlife habitat, supported local communities, and enhanced the resilience of the ecosystems they share.

The Bruce Trail corridor is a landscape made up of “islands of conservation” interspersed with private property. Urban expansion, infrastructure development, and changing land use patterns have contributed to fragmentation across parts of the Escarpment, creating gaps between forested areas. These gaps can make it more difficult for forest-dependent species to roam, find suitable habitat, and maintain healthy populations. As a result, efforts to strengthen and reconnect forested areas of the Bruce Trail corridor and the broader Niagara Escarpment ecosystem are a key part of maintaining their ecological functions.

Being vulnerable to development, the Bruce Trail Conservancy (BTC) stresses that securing private land is essential to maintain ecological continuity along the Escarpment (Bruce Trail Conservancy, Conservation Process). BTC is one of Ontario’s largest land trusts.

The model the BTC uses to steward and maintain the Bruce Trail is heavily reliant on over 1,500 volunteers, who are supported by 28 staff. Together, these individuals work to ensure that every portion of the Bruce Trail and all BTC-protected land is properly monitored, maintained and enhanced for the safety of residents, visitors and wildlife alike.

The Bruce Trail itself is divided into nine local Clubs, each of which is responsible for the maintenance of the Trail and BTC-protected conservation lands within that section. Each Club chooses a Trail Director and Land Stewardship Director, who coordinates a team of Trail Captains and Land Stewards to provide boots-on-the-ground support. Annual and real-time user-generated reports inform the Clubs regarding trail and property conditions, allowing Directors and staff to respond to any issues. Trail Development and Maintenance teams host work parties that range from trail maintenance, infrastructure upkeep and installation, and trail blazing and ecological restoration, all to create a conservation corridor along the Niagara Escarpment that contains a free public footpath.

Another way that the BTC works towards encouraging ecological health along the Niagara Escarpment is through their Landowner Stewardship Program. This program fosters relationships with landowners who allow the Bruce Trail to be on their land. Through this program, staff provide consultation on ecological restoration considerations including the removal of invasive species and the planting of native ones. This helps extend the reach of the organization’s conservation efforts and tries to break away from the ‘Islands of Conservation’ model to approach stewardship of the Niagara Escarpment as a conservation corridor.

Filling the Gaps: Forests Canada’s Role Along the Bruce Trail

Tree planting efforts led by Forests Canada are helping to restore and reconnect forest cover along the Bruce Trail corridor.

Since 2008, Forests Canada has worked with over 320 landowners across more than 750 sites to plant more than 2 million trees within one kilometre of the trail. A significant portion of this work (over 400 hectares and 900,000 trees) has taken place within 250 metres of the trail itself.

Forests Canada's efforts on the Bruce Trail have been sustained for the past 20 years.

Most recently, in 2026, the Nottawasaga Valley Conservation Authority, in partnership with Forests Canada, undertook a project of planting 8,000 native trees in an area near the Bruce Trail. A diverse mix of trees were planted, including Eastern White Cedar, Bur and Red Oak, White Pine and Black Walnut. Bev Matthews, the Land Securement Director for the Blue Mountains Bruce Trail Club, was on-site during the tree planting. Bev is responsible for helping to secure land in the area and spoke with the landowner to suggest converting a portion of the property back to a forest.

As well as being close to the Bruce Trail, the planting site is near the Escarpment Biosphere Conservancy-protected Mantec and Bates Nature Preserve and the BTC-protected Lime Kiln Bluffs Nature Reserve.

The Lime Kiln Bluffs property was secured in 2020 by the BTC. It represents 36 acres of forested land that contains some spectacular Escarpment features and a historical lime kiln that was restored in 2015. The property houses Butternut and American Hart’s Tongue Fern, both of which are listed as Species at Risk. This property represents one piece of the Bruce Trail Conservation Corridor, which now amounts to over 16,000 acres of Niagara Escarpment land. The BTC’s Director of Conservation and Trail, Adam Brylowski, says that “Partnerships with organizations like Forests Canada are crucial to allow us to fulfill our mission of protecting a ribbon of wilderness, for everyone, forever.”

The planting area fills a gap in forest cover adjacent to the Nature Preserve. Adding to existing canopy cover improves the resilience and effectiveness of these lands for interior forest species.

Rather than creating isolated pockets of forest, Forests Canada’s tree planting efforts are concentrated in areas where they fill gaps between existing forests, gradually strengthening the continuity of forest habitat over time. Because forest development is a long-term process, these ecological benefits will continue to increase as planted stands mature and develop more complex canopy structures. As these sites continue to mature, their contribution to surrounding forest habitat is expected to become more significant.

A Species That Tells a Story: Wood Thrush and Forest Health

One way to better understand the ecological context of these landscapes is by looking at species that depend on forest habitat. The Wood Thrush is a migratory songbird that prefers large, mature forests and is considered a species at risk in Canada, largely due to the loss and fragmentation of its breeding habitat.

Wood Thrush Breeding Bird Survey results show a significant annual rate of decline of 4.29% between 1970 and 2011, which amounts to a population loss of 83% over the last 41 years. Research has shown that Wood Thrush is less likely to occur in isolated woodlots and may avoid crossing large non-forested gaps. This reinforces the importance of connected forest habitat across the landscape.

In Canada, Wood Thrush commonly nests in mature deciduous and mixed forests with a well-developed understory. Because it is sensitive to gaps between forested areas, it is often used as an indicator of how well forest habitats are connected across a landscape (Eastern Ontario Model Forest). This makes it possible to use species occurrence data as a complementary line of evidence when interpreting how well forests are connected across the landscape.

Using publicly available observations from the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), we can see that Wood Thrush has been consistently recorded in areas surrounding planting sites near the Bruce Trail corridor. GBIF includes community science data collected through platforms like eBird and iNaturalist.

There have been over 650 observations of Wood Thrush within 500 metres of Forests Canada supported planting sites located within one kilometre of the Bruce Trail. The BTC has recorded 184 observations of Wood Thrush on 94 BTC-protected lands.

While these observations do not confirm that the birds are directly using newly planted areas, they do show that these planting efforts are taking place within landscapes supporting forest-dependent species.

Every Wood Thrush sighting submitted through platforms like eBird, or iNaturalist becomes a small but meaningful contribution to understanding how forest habitats are changing and how species respond to restoration over time.

By combining community science with tree-planting, Forests Canada can better understand how restoration efforts fit into real ecological patterns on the ground.

In this way, community science data becomes a powerful tool to help show where forest-dependent species like Wood Thrush are already present and how those landscapes are changing.

Looking Ahead: Growing a More Connected Landscape

Together, these findings show that tree planting efforts led by Forests Canada are taking place in landscapes that support forest-dependent species and are contributing to the gradual increase of forest cover along the Bruce Trail corridor.

While newly planted areas take time to mature into fully functional habitat, early signals from satellite data and species observations suggest that these efforts are helping to strengthen and reconnect forested areas over time.

As these forests continue to grow, they are expected to play an increasing role in supporting wildlife movement and maintaining the ecological function of this important landscape.

Aidan O’Brien is a GIS and Data Analyst with Forests Canada. Aidan is passionate about restoring land and is an avid hiker, birdwatcher, cartographer and naturalist who currently resides in Guelph Ontario on Treaty No.3 Between the Lakes Purchase land, the traditional territory of the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation.