annual report 2011 - Forestry Tasmania

chief scientist’s report
Dr Steve Read
Steve.Read@forestrytas.com.au
Research has been described as the conversion of dollars
into knowledge, whereas innovation is the subsequent
conversion of that knowledge into a greater amount of
dollars. The research and development group in any
commercial organisation will thus thrive only while it
can successfully argue that its work has positive impact
on commercial outcomes. The front cover of this report
illustrates a collaborative project in which the Forestry
Tasmania plantation research team is following a plantation
stand and genetics trial though timber milling to the
final product and then its market uptake. With increasing
volumes of plantation timber becoming available, the
links between genetics, silviculture and product value can
be directly investigated, resulting not just in the ability to
grow better trees, but also in development of processing
approaches specific to this new resource, and new markets.
This year also saw a focus on the cost-effectiveness of
the integrated leaf-beetle management program run by
Forestry Tasmania’s forest health surveillance team. Both
larvae and adults of the Tasmanian eucalypt leaf beetle
Paropsisterna bimaculata consume the foliage of plantation
eucalypts, and an extensive annual monitoring program,
linked to modelling of potential timber volume losses,
determines the coupes in which management actions
will be undertaken. Analysis of data entered by Districts
into the Forest Operations Database showed that each
$1 spent on the program averted timber losses of $1.76
(net present value). The work also showed these financial
benefits would almost double with a program that was
more targeted and that extended into older plantations.
Research programs that have strategic benefit, or maintain
access to forest resources, are of course not as amenable
to this kind of analysis, so alternative ways of determining
their impact need to be developed, but the ability to show
savings greater than the research spend is an important
incentive to maintain research and development capacity.
Another exciting achievement this year was seeing the
Tasmanian Forest Insect Collection website (www.tfic.
net.au) go live. Beetles have a key role both in forest
biodiversity and as forest pests, and the TFIC, a satellite
collection of the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery,
was developed by Forestry Tasmania because of the
importance of beetles and other insects in many of our
research programmes. The TFIC web-site contains a page
for each beetle species, with individual photographs as
well as automatically generated distribution maps, and is a
valuable resource for researchers and collaborators.
Formal conclusion and acceptance by the Commonwealth
of the Alternatives to Clearfelling research program of the
Tasmanian Community Forest Agreement also occurred
in 2010/11. While clearfell, burn and sow is a practical
approach to harvesting wet eucalypt forests, and gives
good regeneration, repeated applications will lead to
coupe-level losses of mature-forest species and structures
that would survive into stands regenerating following
natural wildfire. The proven alternative, aggregated
retention, was developed by reference to the spatial
patterns of the occasional, intense wildfires that are the
natural disturbance regimes in Tasmania’s wet sclerophyll
and mixed forests, and allows coupe-scale persistence
of mature-forest biodiversity, facilitates recolonisation of
harvested areas by mature-forest species, and provides
connectivity across the developing forest stand: it
complements the reservation of forests elsewhere in the
landscape.
More than 50 aggregated retention coupes have been
harvested in mature forest across Tasmania in the last
few years, and Robyn Scott is continuing to describe the
nature of the regenerating stands. Combining the Warra
Silvicultural Systems Trial with analysis of ecological metrics
in operational coupes has provided Forestry Tasmania with
a fresh and practical approach to adaptive management.
Our learning in regard to monitoring ecological outcomes
can now be applied to harvesting of younger forests of
smaller trees for a range of newer products.
Fire - a driver of the dynamics of eucalypt ecosystems
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