27 resources found

Out On A Limb is a series that uplifts trailblazers in BC communities who are leading innovative management practices for the betterment of the forests of tomorrow. This episode of Out on a Limb features Li?l?wat Forestry Ventures and highlights their unique holistic approach to forest management. Join Klay Tindall, General Manager, and Jordon Gabriel, Forestry Technician, as they reflect on how innovation is built into the very core of their approach to forest management, stressing the importance of adaptability and learning from the land. They offer advice to those considering similar innovative practices in forestry management and emphasize the use of local knowledge to manage the forest for a variety of values.

Out On A Limb is a series that uplifts trailblazers in BC communities who are leading innovative management practices for the betterment of the forests of tomorrow. This episode of Out On A Limb spotlights West Fraser's work around Quesnel, supported by expertise from Government of BC biologists and Esk'etemc Lands and Resources Guardians. Join Janelle Hale and Laurel La Riviere as they explain their approach to managing fisher habitat using the Fisher Habitat Retention Spatial Data and Tool. Sandra Frey, Carnivore Conservation Biologist with the Government of BC, also shares an accessible overview of fisher behaviour, their habitat needs, and how forest practitioners can use the Fisher Tool to guide their prescriptions. Esk'etemc Guardians, Eric Dick, Tracer Weingart and Dale Johnson share their perspectives on fishers and the importance of monitoring and conserving fishers.

Out On A Limb is a series that uplifts trailblazers in BC communities who are leading innovative management practices for the betterment of the forests of tomorrow. In this episode of Out on a Limb, the SIP joins Alkali Resource Management, which is 100% owned by Esk'etemc First Nation, and project partners from the Government of BC to learn more about the impacts and benefits of ARM's innovative approaches just south of Williams Lake, BC. Francis Johnson and Julian Paul walk through some ways ARM aims to create resilience in stands that possess dense understories of small trees, increasing wildfire risk, and decreasing suitability as wildlife habitat using partial harvest with clumpy spacing and prescribed burning to restore forest health and revitalize cultural uses and values. This collaborative project evaluates the efficacy of ARM's treatments on understory vegetation and wildlife use, wildfire risk, disturbance agents, and overall forest integrity and resiliency. By blending Indigenous stewardship, applied research, and on-the-ground treatments, the trial is generating valuable insights into how these forests can become more resilient to disturbance while supporting mule deer winter range, biodiversity, and culturally important plants.

Out On A Limb is a series that uplifts trailblazers in BC communities who are leading innovative management practices for the betterment of the forests of tomorrow. In this episode of Out on a Limb, the SIP joins Harrop-Procter Community Forest to learn about their innovative approach to anticipate and adapt to climate change impacts. Harrop-Procter CF has spent the past 15 years adapting their forest management approach to respond to climate change impacts on their forest and surrounding landscape. Using a risk assessment approach, they are able to identify areas with varying risk to climate change and prioritize management actions. Erik Leslie, Forest Manager at Harrop-Procter, unpacks the three types of Operations Strategies he employs using his climate adaptation framework: Resistance, Resilience, and Transition. the SIP joins him in the field to visit three sites where these strategies have resulted in specific treatments to make the site either resistant, resilient, or completely transitioned on a new trajectory. Erik shows us how managers can integrate climate science and risk assessment into practical forestry decision making.

In this webinar, representatives from the First Nations Emergency Services Society and their conservation partners detail the implementation of Integrated Fire Management Planning to protect both human infrastructure and ecological connectivity corridors. The project uses a sophisticated integrated spatial database that layers historical wildfire data, old-growth status, and wildlife habitats with modern fire modeling and LiDAR technology to forecast risks. By moving beyond isolated, project-based grants toward landscape-level planning, the initiative seeks to foster collaborative governance between Indigenous communities and government agencies.

This webinar examines how the historical suppression of Indigenous cultural burning, combined with aggressive logging and modern fire exclusion, has dangerously altered the composition of dry forests. The research explored in this webinar reveals that these landscapes have shifted from fire-resistant environments dominated by Ponderosa Pine and Western Larch to overcrowded, drought-stressed stands of Douglas-fir. This loss of species diversity significantly reduces the forest's ability to survive high-severity fires and capture carbon, especially as climate change accelerates the expansion of hot, arid conditions. This webinar argues that restoring ecological resilience requires integrating diverse knowledge sources with advanced technologies, such as machine learning and spatial data, to better monitor and manage these shifting ecosystems.

This webinar explores strategies for mitigating wildfire severity through proactive fuel treatments, drawing on extensive research from large-scale fire events in the Pacific Northwest. It details how the accumulation of forest fuels due to decades of fire exclusion has created vulnerable landscapes prone to high-severity, stand-replacing fires. Findings demonstrate that while thinning alone is often insufficient, the combination of thinning and prescribed burning significantly increases tree survivorship and creates effective barriers to fire spread.

This webinar explores how fire-behaviour science should guide the design of fuel-treatment prescriptions in British Columbia, emphasizing that treatments must be tied to measurable changes in predicted fire intensity and spread rather than just stand-structure outcomes. It reviews key elements of the Canadian Forest Fire Danger Rating System, especially the Fire Behaviour Prediction system, to show how fuels, weather, and topography interact to influence wildfire behaviour. The webinar outlines how professionals can set clear treatment targets and demonstrates how modelling tools help evaluate whether a proposed treatment will achieve those outcomes. The webinar also highlights the need for specialized training in fire behaviour and fuel management, noting that effective prescriptions require both technical knowledge and practical experience. fuel-treatment plans.

This webinar outlines the strategic framework for wildfire risk reduction in British Columbia, emphasizing the transition from traditional fire suppression to proactive fuel management. It explores how effective mitigation requires a risk-based approach, where practitioners analyze the likelihood and consequences of fire to prioritize treatments within the wildland-urban interface. Central to the webinar is the use of science-based fire behavior targets, such as maintaining specific critical surface intensities and increasing crown base height to prevent ground fires from climbing into the canopy. The webinar highlights that while mechanical thinning is vital, the integration of prescribed fire and FireSmart principles is essential for maintaining these fuel breaks and ensuring long-term community resiliency.

This webinar explores the relationship between mountain pine beetle outbreaks and subsequent wildfire behavior within the lodgepole pine ecosystems of South Central Oregon. Researchers detail a chrono-sequence study and an assessment of the Pole Creek Fire to challenge the conventional assumption that beetle-killed forests inevitably lead to more catastrophic burns. Findings reveal that while active crown fires can still occur, higher prior beetle mortality often results in lower fire severity under extreme weather conditions due to a reduction in available canopy fuels. The webinar characterizes these disturbances as a natural cycle where native insects and fire interact to create landscape heterogeneity and promote long-term ecosystem resilience.

This webinar examines the complex relationship between mountain pine beetle outbreaks and subsequent wildfire patterns across the western United States. By categorizing infestation into red, gray, and old stages, this research tests whether the presence of dead or dying trees significantly increases a forest's vulnerability to fire. Findings reveal that despite changes to fuel flammability, beetle activity has a negligible effect on total area burned and does not act as a primary driver of fire severity. Instead, the study suggests that topography and extreme fire weather remain the dominant factors influencing fire behavior, regardless of prior insect disturbance. This webinar argues that management policies should prioritize addressing climate change and drought as the underlying causes of both disturbances rather than focusing on a supposed synergism between beetles and fire.

This webinar examines the complex relationship between insect outbreaks and subsequent wildfire dynamics in the Pacific Northwest. By analyzing decades of data on the mountain pine beetle and the western spruce budworm, this webinar challenges the common campfire hypothesis that dead trees inevitably lead to more frequent or more intense fires. The findings reveal that insect activity does not consistently increase fire likelihood and often results in lower burn severity because the insects act as a natural thinning agent that reduces available fuel over time. Overall, this study suggests that while these native disturbances significantly alter the landscape, they do not constitute a regional fire hazard or an immediate forest health crisis requiring aggressive management intervention.

This webinar explores the landscape-level effectiveness of fuel treatments in the Southern Blue Mountains of Oregon. Using the Landis-II simulation model, the study evaluates how different management strategies such as mechanical thinning and prescribed burning impact wildfire spread and severity under both contemporary and extreme weather scenarios. A primary finding is that while treatments work at a local scale, tripling the current levels of prescribed fire is necessary to significantly shift wildfire behavior across the broader landscape. The research suggests that spatially optimizing treatments in high-risk zones can be just as effective as distributing them widely, offering a more efficient way to manage resources while preparing for a future of increased wildfire activity driven by climate change.

This webinar explores landscape fuel treatment effectiveness, shifting the focus from individual forest stands to broad-scale fire behavior. By integrating empirical studies, simulation modeling, and manager-led case studies, the webinar provides a multifaceted view of how strategic vegetation removal can alter a wildfire's trajectory even beyond the treated boundaries. A central theme is the distinction between site-level and landscape-level effects, emphasizing that treatments are most successful when they function as a spatial mosaic designed to facilitate suppression efforts and reduce high-severity fire. The webinar proposes a new iterative monitoring framework that encourages land managers to move past simple metrics like acres burned toward a more nuanced understanding of landscape resilience and treatment longevity in an era of climate change.

This webinar discusses operationalizing adaptive silviculture for climate change through a multi-site research network. The core purpose of the project is to provide forest managers with real-world, operational examples of integrating climate change adaptation principles into practice, specifically by fostering ecosystem resilience to uncertain futures. The research employs a consistent framework across various forest types, testing three primary adaptation strategies including resistance, resilience, and transition. The webinar details the work at the Minnesota pine site, highlighting local climate vulnerability to drought and the application of these three treatments: simple thinning for resistance, mixed-species restoration for resilience, and aggressive transition management using both native and novel, future-adapted species like Ponderosa pine.

This webinar details the core concepts of silvicultural systems, which are comprehensive approaches to forest management defined by three continuous elements: regeneration, tending, and harvesting. These systems are structured along a practical spectrum of harvest intensity, starting with low-disturbance selection methods suitable for shade-tolerant species and culminating in high-intensity treatments like clearcutting, which favor light-demanding species. The choice of technique, such as the multi-step shelterwood method or the more localized seed tree method, depends entirely on the desired future condition of the stand and the ecology of the target tree species. Successful silviculture is presented as both a science and an art, requiring creative application of various treatments, including intermediate thinning, to achieve specific outcomes.

This webinar explores the highly contentious management of old growth forests in British Columbia. The consensus among the presenters is that a radical paradigm shift is essential, replacing the current timber-focused system with one that prioritizes ecosystem health and biodiversity. Key themes include the importance of empowering First Nations to lead local planning processes, intense debate over the true extent of remaining old growth data, and the failure of provincial government intent to implement past strategic recommendations. The discussion stresses that adopting an integrated, land-centric approach is the only viable path to stewardship for future generations.

This webinar explores silvicultural options for managing for mature and old-growth forest conditions across a range of forest and ownership types in the US. The consistency of these strategies with other objectives and programs tied to biodiversity conservation, climate mitigation, and forest adaptation are discussed.

This webinar outlines a successful ten-year effort to refine reforestation techniques using post-harvest slash burning in Minnesota after a large-scale jack pine budworm salvage operation. While initial attempts tried to use fire and direct seeding for complete restoration, the team discovered that the prescribed burns were most effective when used as a tool for controlling aggressive woody competition like aspen. Experience taught the team that achieving deep root-kill and effective brush control depends on conducting burns during late summer dry soil conditions, which is crucial for maximizing intensity. The resulting methodology integrates fire as a hybrid replacement for chemical herbicide application, successfully preparing sites for planting and promoting the establishment of diverse jack pine stands.

This webinar focused on adapting timber management practices to environmental shifts. The webinar establishes the urgent need for adaptation by detailing regional climate projections, including rising temperatures and increased summer drought frequency, which pose significant threats to traditionally managed commercial species like Red Pine. The framework consisting of Resistance, Resilience, and Transition strategies is introduced, demonstrating how varying levels of silvicultural intervention, from thinning to mitigate drought to planting novel species via assisted migration, can reduce climate vulnerability. The central purpose of the discussion is to convince land managers that they can implement these science-backed silvicultural actions to sustain forest productivity and commercial value despite increasing ecological risks.