Local Communities Seeking Forestry Solutions

October 20, 2001

Innovation in how the community is involved in the forest management planning process is a central component of the Morice & Lakes Innovative Forest Practices Agreement. The Sustainable Forest Management Plan, which is the core document of the process, features input from Scenario Planning Teams and Public Advisory Groups as well as the general public.

These advisory groups and teams are comprised of interested members of the public and resource professionals representing a variety of interests. Their task is to identify interests and values associated with the forest and to develop and evaluate scenarios for sustainable resource management. They are assisted in this process by technical expertise from contracted resource specialists and the IFPA's own technical committee.

This is time consuming work - planning teams in the Morice as well as the Lakes Timber Supply Areas have met in two-day sessions twice each month to participate in this important process.

This planning work is being delivered with the assistance of Dwight Scott Wolfe and Steve Voros of The McGregor Group, a Prince George-based forestry consulting firm that has developed a sophisticated spatial analysis approach for sustainable forest management.

"We identified 160 resource values in the Morice and some 100 resource values in the Lakes," said Wolfe. These values encompass the full range of natural resources in the Lakes and Morice area, including recreation, wildlife, watershed, timber and biodiversity. Such abundance of information can be difficult to handle when it comes down to decision-making, however. "The data was a little overwhelming and we needed to make it more manageable," added Voros.

To address this volume of data, the Lakes and Morice Scenario Planning Teams have worked under one roof for the past few months to consolidate resource values. "We temporarily combined the two teams from each TSA and went through an exercise of rationalization," said Wolfe. "The result has been to scale down the scope of the project to a more manageable size." Said Voros: "This will make it easier to complete the scenario modeling, which is the next step along the way to the Sustainable Forest Management Plan."

In scenario planning, participants formulate a variety of scenarios for managing the forest based on the resource values they have identified. Each scenario is then projected into the future using The McGregor Group's forest estate model to see how the forest will look if it is managed under each scenario. The goal is to find forestry solutions that work for all participants in the IFPA process. In the coming months a series of maps and reports will be prepared and different forest management strategies will be assessed, adjusted and in some cases replaced. The idea will be to develop a series of learning scenarios and a final decision scenario for each TSA. The final decision scenarios will form the basis of the Sustainable Forest Management Plan.