In 1976-77, a set of 13 jack pine biomonitoring sites was established in the Athabasca Oil Sands area in order to biomonitor both impingement and impact of emissions characteristic of oil sands extraction operations. No measureable air pollutant effect was observed on either vascular or lichen communities at any site even though significantly high tissue pollutant concentrations were documented from sites within 10 km of GCOS. The importance of future time-course sampling of permanent sites is emphasized because our inability to measure a biological effect at these sites may have been purely because of the great natural variability in the region.