At October's 2016 Spruce Summit, retired UNBC professor Staffan Lindgren asserted B.C. forest management must change if we want to end bug outbreaks sooner.
Forestry's fundamental purpose is to secure greatest continued value from forest land.
At the summit, some presenters confirmed forest decision makers use fire suppression thinking to manage beetle outbreaks, which:
Wait for signs of potential outbreaks to occur. This course of action has limited effectiveness because vulnerable spruce trees don't show signs of beetle presence until 12 to 18 months after insects have burrowed. "By the time you start recognizing that you have spruce beetle, they're several generations into the outbreak," Lindgren said.
Aim to suppress symptoms, but don't mitigate root causes (climate change).
When mitigation doesn't happen, potential for beetle outbreaks will continue.
Focus on recovery of merchantable timber value, before losses occur. While salvage logging does this - what are the unintended consequences? Are they serious?
The serious consequences were confirmed in June's Ministry report to Prince George City Council which
"...forecast the annual allowable cut for the Prince George timber supply area diving from the current 12.5 million cubic metres available since 2011 to an expected 6.2 million cubic metres in 2020."
This is bad news. The good news is there are forest sustainability policies with positive track records delivering better forest management.
They:
Are proactive - goal (i.e. quality of life) oriented and only take action that move forest conditions towards this desired goal.
Begin with the end point in mind - build forest resilience at the landscape scale.
Invest in infrastructure (policies, knowledge, and skills) providing forest practitioners with means to incrementally achieve these outcomes.
These policies enable forest practitioners to :
Use forest condition indicators to proactively know which trees have enough vigour to recover from stress and which are vulnerable and will probably die.
Improve vigour of host trees (e.g. thinning), while increasing forest diversity and resilience.
Use natural disturbances as nature's way for keeping ecosystems healthy - adding diversity and organic matter from decaying wood.
Use tree mortality in mixed species stands to create growing space and improve resilience of live trees.
Beetles are always present at low levels (endemic) in spruce forests - those with greatest diversity and vigour will have greatest capacity to resist and recover from beetle outbreaks.
Effective forest policies are needed now.
Ray Travers
Victoria
