Version One of SFM Plan Nears Completion

September 30, 2002

Version One of the M&L IFPA sustainable forest management plans for the Morice & Lakes Timber Supply Areas (TSAs) will be ready by early 2003. These early versions—one for each TSA—will spell out ways to achieve optimum forest management based on current practices and assumptions—what’s known as the “base case scenario.” The base case is what the Ministry of Forests uses to predict future timber supply.

“We have had a lengthy public process to get to this point,” said Morice & Lakes IFPA manager Jim Burbee. “Getting through the public advisory process to agreed sets of values, objectives and indicators is a huge accomplishment.”

The enormous planning and data collection efforts required to produce the SFM plan make it one of the largest natural resource analyses of its type ever undertaken in the province. “Conventional analyses such as Timber Supply Reviews analyze how timber extraction impacts other resources,” said Burbee. “In this analysis we're looking to optimize multiple resource value indicators simultaneously.”

Another key innovation of the Morice & Lakes IFPA is the use of scenario planning to enable public participants to work together with forest licensees and natural resource management experts in defining resource values, objectives and indicators.

Now that these indicators have been defined, in the coming months scenario planning teams will be working on developing learning scenarios. These are forest management strategies grouped together into similar themes. Once all learning scenarios are completed, a final decision scenario will be produced which reflects input from all participants. This will form the basis of Version Two of the sustainable forest management plan.

For each scenario a forest estate modeling program will help assess the effect of various options for forest management and practices going into the future. Those options will range on one extreme from ecosystem-based management to increased timber harvesting on the other.

“When we run one of the resource emphasis scenarios like the wildlife emphasis scenario, we'll be able to compare the performance of all indicators for each resource value from that scenario against the base case,” said Dwight Scott Wolfe, who is facilitating the development of the SFM plans. By next year, he predicts, graphs will be prepared showing how an indicator performs under various scenarios.

An enormous amount of information has been compiled on computers to aid in the modeling process-everything from updated forest inventory information to ecosystems, and wildlife habitat to road networks. “There's probably 70 to 100 different data layers that we're organizing,” Wolfe said.

Wolfe expects another 10 to 15 meetings in each TSA before each team reaches a decision scenario.