PARENT SESSION
Friday, August 11, 8:00-11:30 am
COS 111 - Subalpine and boreal forest ecology
Plantation Room, Cook Convention Center
Presiders: V Chavez-Varela
Investigating the reliability of information about landscape-scale boreal forest dynamics as utilized in Ontario forest management plans.
Drescher, Michael*,1, Perera, Ajith1, Ride, Kevin2, Kayahara, Gordon3, 1 Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources, Sault Ste Marie, Sault Ste Marie, Ontario, Canada2 Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources, Thunder Bay, Thunder Bay, Ontario, Canada3 Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources, Timmins, Timmins, Ontario, Canada
ABSTRACT- Current boreal forest management strategies in Ontario are based on the emulation of landscape-scale natural forest dynamics. The success of this approach depends on a reliable understanding of the stochastic driving processes in the forest landscape, which principally are succession and disturbance. Forest management planning tools presently used in Ontario utilize information about boreal forest succession that is not covering the totally available knowledge base and that has not been thoroughly tested. The reliability of the used information is therefore unknown. We are presenting the results of a study that is aimed at quantifying and increasing the reliability of the information contained in the management planning tools. Our approach is based on the integration of elicited local expert knowledge and other information sources into a stochastic and spatially explicit landscape-scale boreal forest dynamics model. The results of the model runs are compared to a spatio-temporal data set of forest dynamics derived from aerial photographs of six boreal forest landscapes with an average size of 6,000 ha covering the period from the 1940s to the 1990s. Preliminary analyses of one landscape suggest high rates of ingress of hardwoods into stands dominated by Picea mariana, lending only limited support to the information that current management planning tools are based upon. The results of this study will be useful in the improvement of boreal forest management strategies.
Key words: boreal forest, succession, model