Rediscovering Gulf of St. Lawrence flora at the Biodôme

A wind of change comes to the Biodôme

Since it opened, in 1992, the Biodôme de Montréal has offered a unique experience by presenting ecosystems from the Americas, each one as captivating as the next. One of those ecosystems represents a Québec coastal landscape of great importance, the Gulf of St. Lawrence. In this riverside ecosystem, visitors discover an environment rich in both plant and animal biodiversity.

Always on the lookout for opportunities to stand out as a living museum, the Biodôme is giving its Gulf of St. Lawrence a subtle and necessary makeover. More specifically, the museum is planning a reorganization of the different habitats that make up the ecosystem. The changes, to be carried out between 2024 and 2025, will primarily affect the collection of temperate-zone plants.

An overview

In the beginning, the Gulf of St. Lawrence ecosystem was divided into four distinct parts: a large saltwater reservoir, a salt marsh, a rocky coastline swept by the waves, and steep cliffs. At the time, the plants in that ecosystem principally represented the Saguenay Fjord and surroundings, more particularly the north shore of the St. Lawrence River around Tadoussac. For an illustration of the geographic situation of the past and the regions that will be represented in the near future, the map below shows the different vegetation zones and bioclimatic domains. According to the Québec government, Bioclimatic domains are large areas defined according to end-of-succession vegetation [vegetation that maintains a stable composition and structure over time] on mesic sites, meaning sites where growth conditions are average – in other words, not too wet and not too dry.¹ On the map, the red dot indicates the Tadoussac area, the area currently represented in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, while the zone in yellow shows the zone that we’re planning to represent as a result of the ecosystem’s reorganization. 

Exploring Québec’s coastal landscapes

For visitors, the expansion of the geographic horizons of the Biodôme’s plant collections amounts to discovering new Québec vegetation zones and their respective bioclimatic domains. More precisely, the current bioclimatic domain representing Tadoussac is the yellow birch fir forest. This sub-zone of the entire northern temperate forest is characterized by relatively dense stands dominated by boreal softwood species or light hardwoods.² The yellow birch fir forest is composed for the most part of yellow birch (Betula alleghaniensis) and balsam fir (Abies balsamea).

With this change of course at the Biodôme, the Gulf of St. Lawrence ecosystem will undergo a transformation, over the coming seasons, in order to represent other Québec vegetation zones and bioclimatic domains of interest. Among those should be noted spruce-moss stands, a typical forest found near Havre-Saint-Pierre, and white birch fir stands, a coastal landscape we come across in the Gaspé Peninsula.

In addition, the possibility of expanding the region covered in the Biodôme ecosystem means that we can showcase a number of plant species typical of the Québec region. Those include the black spruce (Picea mariana) and the paper birch or American white birch (Betula papyrifera). Finally, the addition of these plant species to the ecosystem will enhance the biodiversity of the museum’s flower collections and the experience offered to visitors.

References

¹Zones de végétation et domaines bioclimatiques du Québec, 2016-2024, Government of Québec; site visited on September 25, 2024

²Grondin, Pierre et al., March 1999, Sapinière à bouleau jaune de l’est, rapport de classification écologique, Ministère des Ressources naturelles du Québec, 207 pages Morneau, C. et al., June 2021, Classification écologique du territoire québécois, Ministère des Forêts, de la Faune et des Parcs