Timber Lines

The incredible devastation over a land mass triple the size of Vancouver Island is both unbelievable and frightening. The pest, about the size of a grain of rice, is a natural resident of the neighborhood. It’s only been recently that a harsh winter cold snap has failed to materialize and kill the beetle, with the result that the mountain pine beetle has proliferated at a rate that would make rabbits blush and tough northern loggers twitch nervously.

Over 72-million cubic meters of timber is either dead or dying, enough to build 2.2 million new homes. That’s enough loaded logging trucks to go across Canada bumper-to-bumper three and a half times. In fact, the infestation is almost as big as the entire provincial annual allowable cut of softwood lumber. Cities, towns and villages throughout the Cariboo and the Northern Interior fear that community sustainability is at risk, given the threat to the timber supply over the next 10 to 50 years.

Jim Togyi, the Mayor of Ft. St. James, and the Chair of the NFPA communications committee, says the issue is huge. “The beetle is cutting a hole in the sustainable annual allowable cut,” says Mr. Togyi, “and the bigger the infestation gets, the bigger the hole down the road.” “Residents throughout the central interior are deeply concerned,” he adds, “and they rank the beetle problem alongside the softwood lumber dispute in terms of urgency and importance.”

The Mayor of Quesnel, Steve Wallace, agrees. “The biggest issue is community sustainability.” He says we simply do not have the capacity to cut and mill the infested timber. The issue is complex. While a major effort is under way to control the spread of the outbreak, government and industry must also decide what to do with dead and dying stands of pine, and then struggle with the enormous task of replanting.

This photo of a stand of lodgepole pine illustrates three visible stages of mountain pine beetle infestation. The grey trees were the first to be infected and are now dead. The brownish-red trees are dying, and while the remainder of the stand appears healthy, they are likely also infected.

Mayors, Councils and community members of Vanderhoof, Fraser Lake and Fort St. James joined together to form a Regional Community Economic and Development Management Committee to “build a common path toward community economic stability in relation to the bark beetle forest emergency.” As Vanderhoof Mayor, Len Fox, emphasized, “There can be a tremendous advantage in bringing all of our expertise together to bring about positive outcomes. We must address our energies to develop strategies to combat the infestation and at the same time protect our communities’ long term economic stability.”

While forestry experts in both industry and government ponder the best management strategies, local industry advocacy groups such as the NFPA and the members of NILA advocate an infusion of emergency Federal funding to help manage the crisis. Although Mayor Wallace is optimistic that Federal assistance will eventually be forthcoming to assist in replanting, it will be fifty years or more before reforested areas mature.

Meanwhile, Vanderhoof Forest District Licensees through an initiative of the Innovative Forest Practices Agreement (IFPA) have teamed with a leading forestry consultancy, Timberline Forestry Inventory Consultants, to combine science and technology to utilize their new planning tool designed to help minimize losses and provide direction for harvesting priority. The Manager of B.C. Resource Inventories for Timberline Forestry Inventory Consultants, Mr. Mike Sandvoss, says although the crisis is urgent and real, there are opportunities to mitigate the mid and long-term impacts. Mr. Sandvoss cites a decade of experience between the mid-seventies and the mid-eighties in the Chilcotin, where the mountain pine

beetle infestation covered thousands of hectares of mature pine stands. Through that outbreak and the years that followed, says Mr. Sandvoss, we learned that even dead trees, provided they remain standing, retain structural strength and value for a period of ten to fifteen years, or possibly longer The key is to identify which stands of timber are at greatest risk of falling down shortly after succumbing to beetle attack, and which are likely to remain standing. Standing dead trees, even trees that are losing their bark after a number of years, remain salvageable for milling into structural timber.

That’s where advanced technology, and computerized modeling systems come into play. “Science and technology allow us to make predictions on stand dynamics using computerized models, ” says Frank Caffrey, Registered Professional Forester and ecologist at Timberline’s Prince George office. In other words, we can reduce the guesswork as to whether a particular stand of beetle-killed timber is at immediate risk of collapsing or not,

and as a result, allow us to direct harvesting resources on a priority basis to stands of timber at greatest risk. Mr. Caffrey is quick to point out that we can’t totally predict outcomes in nature, but we can make informed predictions based on currently available

Frank Caffrey, Registered Professional Forester and ecologist at Timberline’s Prince George office, says “Science and technology allow us to make predictions on stand dynamics using computerized models. ”

Guest Editorial - Who's Telling Your Story?	On the Web	QuickBird - Another High Resolution Satellite in Flight
Ecology Contributes to Effective Forest Planning	Mountain Pine Beetle? This Pest Has Been Here Before...	ISO 9000 - Improving Business for Forest Companies
Email Timberline	Timberline Web site	Contact Information