Nature knows best…right? So, our forest management strategies should try to emulate nature? That’s what we used to think. Unfortunately, our ideas on how to emulate natural disturbance rarely result in something that acts like a natural disturbance. Bottom line, we are not fire, and we want different things from fire, so we need to stop acting like fire. We have had some good ideas, and our minds were in the right place, but it is now time to shake things up. Let’s put that big head of ours to use and come up with something that would make mother nature proud.
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Ecological Silviculture Systems
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Quotes
43.23 - 43.32: “The more complex and variable and flexible you make regulations, the more difficult it is to go and see if people are following them or not.”
Takeaways
How do forests work? (06.00)
Ellen is a Professor Emeritus at the University of Alberta, Department of Renewable Resources. She spent time in different places in Canada throughout her life and completed her undergraduate degree in environmental biology in Calgary. She continued into a PhD in plant ecology and did her post-doctoral fellowship in the Department of Forest Sciences. She has almost exclusively studied the interaction of plants in boreal forest ecosystems, the kinds of natural disturbances, and their applications in forest management plans.
Sustainable forest management (10.46)
Ellen concurs with the widely held definition of sustainable forest management as “managing our forests in a way that sustains the full diversity of values they have” like biodiversity, ecological function, hydrology, nutrient cycling, and the dynamics of soil development, along with spiritual, aesthetic and Indigenous values. This differs from the old definition of sustained yield forestry which focused on sustaining timber production. While that was a requirement in the past, given the instances of clear-cutting, a new perspective serves present-day needs.
Emulation of natural disturbances (15.31)
Ellen talks about the origin of sustainable forest management in the 1980s-90s motivated by a desire to sustain a full range of values and inspired by natural disturbance patterns. Earlier references to ecosystem-based management were about invasive species in aquatic ecosystems. However, ecosystem-based management and emulation of natural disturbance became very quickly synonymous. Ellen believes the emulation of natural disturbances is one tool to achieve ecosystem management goals.
Nature knows best? (19.23)
Ellen points out that using natural forest ecology to inform forest management goes back to the 1920s-30s when nature was used as an inspiration to understand how forests functioned and regenerated after disturbances. Emulating natural disturbance seemed like the best way to manage for a diversity of values, and clear-cutting was thought to be a way of emulating a forest fire. However, the effects of fire are much different from forest harvest.
Identifying the real objective (28.12)
The important differentiator of natural disturbance, whether fire, insects or major disturbances is that “they don’t kill everything”. They create opportunities for trees to regenerate and create structural diversity in the forest. The focus should be on forest management plans purposefully emulating the effects of natural disturbance instead of the patterns of natural disturbance. Ellen thinks that emulating the effects of natural disturbance is only one of the tools to help forests in the face of climate change, invasive species and other demands.
Challenges in sustainable forest management (43.00)
Ellen finds that the complexity of implementing regulations related to sustainable forest management is a challenge. There are also worries that some may take advantage of the flexibilities in the regulation or make mistakes in interpreting how natural disturbance effects should be emulated since it is not a well-tested hypothesis. Additionally, forests take a long time to grow, so it will be a slow process. She recommends evaluating the potential pros and cons of each practice before implementing it.
The old and the new (51.17)
Ellen uses the example of deadwood to explain how the understanding of different components of a forest evolves over time. Different technologies today can help us monitor, document and inventory forest biodiversity which allows for more opportunities to manage forests better. She is surprised by the possibilities AI brings into the field. In an age-old forest, new innovations can find a place to help in its sustenance. A chapter in a book she co-wrote talks about finding innovative tools to help meet multiple objectives and adapt to climate change.
Always learning (1.07.08)
Ellen advises learning from Indigenous peoples’ history with landscape management and the tools they use. She shares examples from Scandinavian forest management, where they had done such an effective job of eliminating fire from the landscape that they had to reintroduce it to receive the benefits of fire on the landscape. She hopes “forest management can be viewed like science - as a never-ending set of questions rather than a series of disconnected truths”. She views her own journey as one of continuous learning and looks towards the future positively.
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