Conference Proceedings - Sustainable Forest Management Network ...

• Ways to assess proximity to those objectives: The objective of sustaining biological richness
must be evaluated for the entire tenure rather than to specific cutblocks. Assessments
cannot occur everywhere, so they must be designed in a fashion that can be “scaled
up” to apply to larger areas, and assessing proximity to an objective or its component
features should be assessed by prediction. Prediction is not consistently possible. For
large groups of organisms (e.g., invertebrates and fungi) we know too little to make useful
predictions for more than a very small portion of the group. Effectiveness monitoring
includes both active and passive adaptive management. (“Active adaptive management”
refers to experiments specifically designed to better inform forest practices. “Passive adaptive
management” indicates only the absence of a designed experiment, and includes
retrospective sampling or computer simulation.)
• Ways to modify practices if objectives are not attained (links to management action): The
evaluation system should assess the success of current management activities and track
improvements in management through time (e.g., develop a scientifically-based scoring
procedure providing scores for specific habitat elements, model species or “guilds” of
vertebrates, other organisms, or landscape pattern). The evaluation system should employ
a wide range of monitoring approaches that can be collected into two broad groups:
implementation monitoring and effectiveness monitoring.
Closing the loop
In this example we use old growth forest, associated structural components, and associated focal species.
Indicator 1: Ecological representation (amount and location of old growth stewardship zones)
• Areas that contain higher amounts of poorly represented ecosystem types should be favoured
for location of old growth zones or direct the location of mini-zones.
• The representation analysis shows that the drier warmer variants have fewer unmanaged
areas than other variants, and the higher elevation variant, the MH, has a large proportion
unmanaged.
Results suggest…
• Locations of zones should be adjusted to include more old growth, restoration, or habitat
zones in the warmer, drier variants (CDF and CWHxm), and areas of old growth should
be preserved or restored in these drier variants.
• Monitoring of structures and species should be careful to include the drier variants.
Indicator 2: Habitat structure (old growth structure)
• Large trees (especially large Douglas-fir) and large snags had higher retention levels in
dispersed VR.
• Dispersed VR retained substantially lower levels of many habitat elements than group VR.
Total snag retention was particularly low in dispersed VR.
Results suggest…
• The need for the whole range of habitat elements suggests not neglecting dispersed VR
but putting most emphasis on mixed and group VR. Since mixed VR tended to have
additional retention in the matrix, it should be favoured over group VR.
54
CONFERENCE PROCEEDINGS • BorNet International Conference on Biodiversity Conservation in Boreal Forests