The forests of British Columbia are home to a variety of plant and animal life that is unequalled elsewhere in Canada. To conserve the full variety of these plants and animals, their habitats in the forest must be considered during silvicultural operations such as juvenile spacing. These guidelines describe the mandate for biological diversity, levels of forestry management, designing and executing spacing contracts to maintain stand level biodiversity, and example contract clauses.
Created to ensure that forest managers and workers are familiar with techniques that may be used to maintain or enhance biodiversity during juvenile spacing, and that biodiversity considerations are incorporated into spacing contracts.
This guidebook is intended to assist forestry practitioners in British Columbia to meet the requirements of the provincial Forest Practices Code with respect to spacing, or the cutting of undesirable trees within a young stand to reduce competition among the residual trees for water, nutrients, and sunlight. Chapters of the guidebook cover the regulations regarding spacing, the maximum density required by the silviculture prescription, biological criteria and operational considerations for including spacing in stand management prescriptions, fire protection, maintenance of stand-level biodiversity, considerations for post-treatment densities, manual and mechanized methods of spacing, selection of crop trees, monitoring, and reporting. The appendices include stand selection guidelines for use in stand management prescriptions.
While most efforts at biodiversity conservation have focused primarily on protected areas and reserves, the unprotected lands surrounding those area—the "matrix"—are equally important to preserving global biodiversity and maintaining forest health. In Conserving Forest Biodiversity, leading forest scientists David B. Lindenmayer and Jerry F. Franklin argue that the conservation of forest biodiversity requires a comprehensive and multiscaled approach that includes both reserve and nonreserve areas. They lay the foundations for such a strategy, bringing together the latest scientific information on landscape ecology, forestry, conservation biology, and related disciplines as they examine: the importance of the matrix in key areas of ecology such as metapopulation dynamics, habitat fragmentation, and landscape connectivity general principles for matrix management using natural disturbance regimes to guide human disturbance landscape-level and stand-level elements of matrix management the role of adaptive management and monitoring social dimensions and tensions in implementing matrix-based forest management In addition, they present five case studies that illustrate aspects and elements of applied matrix management in forests. The case studies cover a wide variety of conservation planning and management issues from North America, South America, and Australia, ranging from relatively intact forest ecosystems to an intensively managed plantation. Conserving Forest Biodiversity presents strategies for enhancing matrix management that can play a vital role in the development of more effective approaches to maintaining forest biodiversity. It examines the key issues and gives practical guidelines for sustained forest management, highlighting the critical role of the matrix for scientists, managers, decisionmakers, and other stakeholders involved in efforts to sustain biodiversity and ecosystem processes in forest landscapes.
Stand density management is the process of controlling tree density within a stand to achieve desired objectives. Stand density management practices include the spacing of planted trees, pre-commercial thinning, and commercial thinning. A sound density management prescription must consider three elements of prediction: biological responses of the stand to treatment, economic implications of the treatment, and forest-level effects of the treatment. This document provides essential information on each of these elements, and provides a structured decision process for making site-specific density management prescriptions. Sections of the document cover the biological concepts of timber production, economic principles of timber production, forest planning considerations, the decision process, and density management planning tools. Includes glossary.
