BOOTS ON THE GROUND ARE BEST FOREST DEFENCE
Ministry relies more on computer models than field staff, notes Anthony Britneff.
It is often said that the only certainty is uncertainty. And in the face of uncertainty, it always pays to be careful.
When I first became a professional forester in 1974, “climate change” was rarely, if ever, discussed.
As the years advanced, we came to see that when it came to climate change and our forests, the biggest issue in British Columbia was water. Just like real estate is all about location, location, location, climate change in B.C. is all about water, water, water.
More specifically, too much water at times and nowhere near enough of it at others.
Over the past decade and more, we’ve seen what this has come to mean, both in older forests and in the younger forests we planted to replace the older forests we cut down. While we worry with justification about the older forests we continue to lose, there is much to worry about with the younger forests we are inheriting.
Birch trees have declined in the southern Interior in part due to drought. Insect infestations, including bark beetles, have also grown in severity due to drought and, in the case of the mountain pine beetle, have been amplified by protracted periods of warmer winter temperatures.
The spread of dothistroma, a fungal blight, into forests in the northwest Interior of the province has been linked to prevailing wetter and warmer springs.
Numerous trees have been killed or severely damaged in the face of unusually heavy, wet early snowfalls.
For those who pay attention to these developments, there is growing unease about what this generation and future generations will inherit as our younger forests inch closer to the time when they will be logged again.
Even the healthiest, most carefully selected seedlings that we plant are susceptible to all the damaging agents I have just mentioned and more (those horrific wildfires of last year killed a lot of young trees). And the troubling issue is that as evidence mounts that our young forests are in trouble, evidence also mounts that this harsh reality may not be reflected in one of the most critical of all forest management decisions.
That decision is known as the Allowable Annual Cut determination, or AAC. The provincial chief forester makes it. And it essentially sets out how much forest will be logged in given areas of the province over time.
If the information given to the chief forester is that our younger forests are healthy when in fact the prognosis is nowhere near so rosy, then the result may be logging rates that well exceed the rate at which our younger forests actually grow. For over a decade, there has been a wealth of information that should have been provided to B.C.’s chief foresters that our younger forests are actually in trouble. In the Smithers area, respected researchers such as David Coates and Alex Woods warned years ago about the links between an unprecedented northern outbreak of dothistroma and climate change.
More recently, the duo turned heads with their reports on how a host of “killers and maimers” were killing and damaging numerous trees in younger, planted forests, which raised vexing questions about the reliability of computer models used to project overall tree growth in such forests.
Coates, who recently retired from a distinguished career in the provincial Forest Service, is the seventh most-cited silvicultural scientist in the world. Woods, a pathologist who continues to work for the Forests Ministry, has been named by his peers as a climate change leader.
The duo’s work has been augmented by other forest professionals both within and outside government. But despite that work, recent AAC determinations appear to ignore or significantly discount such warnings. In the recent decision on a new logging rate for the Prince George timber supply area, for example, the noted poor health of younger forests in the region appears to have been largely ignored.
While, on the other hand, significant weight appears to have been given to the gains in tree growth that might theoretically occur from the planting of more genetically improved tree stock and from the forests ministry’s use of assumed increases in site productivity. But unfortunately, neither of those things has been adequately substantiated on the ground, particularly when used in combination with each other.
Hence, the logging rate for the region, while down from what it was before, may not have been set nearly low enough. How is it credible that with all those killers and maimers in young forests, with an unprecedented spruce-beetle infestation and with vast areas of old and young pine forests killed by the mountain pine beetle — not to mention the wildfires — that the government’s timber supply review process resulted in a reduction of the AAC of only 11 per cent less than the rate of logging allowed before the pinebeetle devastation?
This does not bode well. A credible approach to the uncertainty of climate change is to be cautious. What if those theoretical gains from genetically improved seed combined with increased estimates of site productivity do not materialize because of climate change? It means we will have lived at the expense of the next three or so generations and to the detriment of the rich biological diversity of mammals, fish and plants on which we all depend.
In an encouraging development, the chief forester has struck a blue-ribbon panel of outside experts to develop recommendations that will help to guide her in improving the government’s understanding of our vast forest inventory. But beyond that, more must happen.
In my decades with B.C.’s Forest Service, I watched as ministry staff placed more and more reliance on computer models to tell us what was there and correspondingly less value on ground monitoring of what is actually happening to our forests.
What that meant was that there was less institutional interest and value placed in what field staff observed on the ground. If what the field staff saw did not jibe with what the models predicted should be there, then at best their monitoring was discounted and at worst it was ignored.
In this time of uncertainty, we need boots on the ground more than ever. Our most critically important forest management decisions depend on informed decisions adjusted for observed trends and uncertainty.
For decades now, through mill closures and job losses, the residents of forest-dependent communities have been paying for the unaccounted uncertainty associated with mismanaged inventory and monitoring data, with unsubstantiated assumptions about tree growth in computer models, and with the effects of climate change. This needs to change.
If the information given to the chief forester is that our younger forests are healthy when in fact the prognosis is nowhere near so rosy, then the result may be logging rates that well exceed the rate at which our younger forests actually grow. Anthony Britneff A credible approach to the uncertainty of climate change is to be cautious.