Project Details

The world's population doubled between 1960 and 2000: an increase of 3 billion. The pressure that this poses for the world's forests requires the establishment of a new relationship between humanity and forests. There are many possible ways in which we could change forestry. One is to zone forests into different intensities of management, reducing pressure on less resilient forests, and increasing the flow of goods and services from more resilient forests. Within the southern interior of BC, the Montane Spruce (MS) Zone (which exists elevationally between the more sensitive Interior Douglas-fir and Engelmann Spruce-Subalpine Fir Zones) offers the potential for considerable increases in timber production, permitting reduced pressure on these less resilient lower and higher elevation zones.

The best guide to change in forestry is experience. Unfortunately, we do not have rotation-length experience of the response of MS Zone forests of various types to different scenarios of intensification, and their interactions with bark beetle epidemics and possible climate change. These risk factors will affect decisions with respect to investment in intensification of management. Lacking experience, we can apply knowledge-based forecasting tools. Better still is to use tools that combine experience and knowledge. This project will modify FORECAST, an existing stand-level ecosystem management model that merges experience and knowledge, and will calibrate it for these MS Zone forests and risk factors. The forecasts will be used to drive landscape-level evaluations, and educational/extension tools to render the results accessible to the public.