Development of integrated ecological standards of sustainable forest management at an operational scale

Abstract

Pierre Drapeau114, Sylvie ~a u t h i e r l~~, David F' ar6115, Richard Carignan6, Rene Doucet7, Luc Bouthillier2, and Christian ~e s s i e r l Within Canada, and internationally, an increasing demand that forests be managed to maintain all resources has led to the development of criteria and indicators of sustainable forest management. There is, however, a lack of understanding, at an operational scale, how to evaluate and compare forest management activities to ensure the sustainability of all resources. For example, nationally, many of the existing indicators are too broad to be used directly at a local scale of forest management; provincially, regulations are often too prescriptive and rigid to allow for adaptive management; and forest certification programs, often based largely on public or stakeholder opinion instead of scientific understanding, may be too local in nature to permit a comparison of operations across a biome. At an operational scale indicators must be relevant to forest activities and ecologically integrated. In order to aid decision-makers in the adaptive management necessary for sustainable forest management, two types of indicators are identified: those that are prescriptive to aid in planning forest management and those that are evaluative to be used in monitoring and suggesting improvements. An integrated approach to developing standards based on an ecosystem management paradigm is outlined for the boreal forest where the variability inherent in natural systems is used to define the limits within which forest management is ecologically sustainable. Sustainability thresholds are thus d e f i by ecosystem response after natural disturbances. For this exercise, standards are proposed for biodiversity, forest productivity via regeneration, soil conservation and aquatic resources. For each of these standards, planning indicators are developed for managing forest conditions while forest values are evaluated by environmental indicators, thus leading to a continuous cycle of improvement. Approaches to developing critical thresholds and corresponding prescriptions are also outlined. In all cases, the scale of evaluation is clearly related to the landscape (or FMU) level while the stand level is used for measurement purposes. In this view the forest should be managed as a whole even though forest interventions are usually undertaken at the stand level.

How do Alberta's, Ontario's and Quebec's forest operation laws respect ecological sustainable forest management criteria in the boreal forest?

“…However, the trade-off is that such a practice may destroy too much of the advance regeneration. Links with other indicators must therefore be apparent, with clear priorities (Kneeshaw et al 2000a). On fine-textured soils, compaction is harmful, and concentrating machinery traffic on regularly spaced paths is justified.…”

“…However, concentration of such an activity must not create serious rutting. Kneeshaw et al (2000a) note that SFM is a continual process of improvement and that two types of indicators are necessary in order to achieve this goal, i.e., planning and monitoring indicators. Planning indicators help orient operations towards interventions that are believed to be "sustainable," while monitoring indicators serve to evaluate the extent to which objectives have been achieved.…”

The Canadian Ecology Centre – Forestry Research Partnership: Implementing a research strategy based on an active adaptive management approach

“…It is used to reduce uncertainty by developing alternative management strategies and monitoring and evaluating how different indicators within a system will respond, and implementing the more favourable option(s) (Holling 1978(Holling , 2001Gunderson 1999;Kneeshaw et al 2000;Harvey et al 2003). The concept and approach has been described and used in a range of resource management contexts from fisheries, to wildlife, to forestry (MacDonald et al 1997(MacDonald et al , 1998).…”

Achieving forest biodiversity outcomes across scales, jurisdictions and sectors with cycles of adaptive management integrated through criteria and indicators

“…Both coarse (e.g., forest cover, fragmentation) and fine (e.g., species, gene) filter approaches are required to detect changes in the system (Carignan and Villard 2002). The selection of a set of indicators, although area/scale-specific (Kneeshaw et al 2000), can be grouped into broader categories (guilds, communities, associations, other functional groups) to allow reporting at the appropriate scale. Meffe and Carroll (1994) suggest that indicators should focus on processes rather than species.…”