Abstract
Intensive silviculture is practiced in many parts of the world but is rare in the public forests of western Canada. Here, we make the argument that intensive silviculture could be justified in Alberta but has not been implemented due to philosophies and policy decisions by foresters from government, industry and academia. These include adherence to long rotations, management goals that are aimed at sustained total volume yield rather than economic value, limitations in the types of stands that are allowed to be regenerated and models that do not include intensive silviculture options. In Mixedwood Growth Model projections, we demonstrate the potential of intensive silviculture that includes combinations of selecting good sites and thinning to produce merchantable stands by age 50 compared to the standard rotation age of 80 with basic silviculture. There could be even more gains if forest level constraints in timber flow were removed due to the increased growth of regenerating stands. Finally, we examine the attitude and policy changes that we believe are necessary for adoption of more intensive silviculture systems on parts of Alberta’s forest landbase.
Highlights
Intensive silviculture has been shown to increase timber productivity from 4- to8-fold in warm temperate climates [1,2] and up to 3-fold in cooler boreal climates such as Scandinavia and Canada [3,4,5]
Most of the forest lands of Alberta are under some form of independent forest certification and while each province has its own forest laws, the public forests of Canada are unified by the six principle of sustainable forest management adopted by the Canadian Council of Forest Ministers
If intensive silviculture is to be adopted, changes are needed to our culture and regulatory system
Summary
Intensive silviculture has been shown to increase timber productivity from 4- to. 8-fold in warm temperate climates [1,2] and up to 3-fold in cooler boreal climates such as Scandinavia and Canada [3,4,5]. The basic goal of this management is to maintain pre-harvest species composition and productivity in the range of 2–4 m3 /ha/year with rotations of 70–100 years Overall, such policies seem to be a compromise of promoting and sustaining wood production in the context of integrated forest management where stands and forests are to be managed for a full suite of forest values including watersheds, biodiversity and recreation. These current management systems, have been developed incrementally, with the best knowledge and concerns of the times when they were established, to address problems as they were identified. We feel that the opportunities, issues and processes identified in this paper will have applications to intensive management on public lands in other regions of Canada and other places with public forest lands
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