Regional Priority Land uses: A Sustainable Forestry Strategy
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In Alberta, and many parts of Canada, forest companies produce a Detailed Forest Management Plan (DFMP) that provides a comprehensive statement of how the company will manage its activities on a designated landbase in a sustainable manner. These DFMP’s have the potential to form the basis of a strategic land use strategy. The plans are based on extensive spatially explicit vegetation and land use inventories and they outline longterm wood supply calculations, spatial harvest and regeneration plans, road development strategies, and plans for biodiversity maintenance.
Although the forest industry is now making great strides in project-by-project co-planning activities with other industrial sectors, most DFMP’s fail to adequately incorporate the implications of developing alternate land uses on wood supply and biodiversity sustainability. A spatially stratified model such as ALCES is capable of integrating multiple land uses at the strategic level. However, forest companies are more comfortable with fully spatially explicit models, and there are significant challenges to incorporating energy sector development into these sorts of models.
The objective for this project will be to work with our forest industry partners to make their “forest-centric” projection models into actual Integrated Landscape Management Models. Some partners are well along this pathway. For example Millar Western Forest Products is integrating energy sector development and human population growth into SELES and FORECAST models that are then linked to a series of vertebrate species indicators through habitat supply models. We will apply ILMMs through a series of workshops to explore the constraints behind more effective planning, and develop approaches that accelerate progress towards true integration.
Working at the scale of company Forest Management Areas, we will quantify the current industrial footprint on the landbase, project future development, and assess the implications of this changing human footprint (including population increase and infrastructure development) on efforts to manage forests in a sustainable manner. At the same time we will run concurrent ALCES model runs to determine if the spatially explicit versus spatially stratified models produce similar outputs. The intention is to combine a series of Forest Management Areas into a “Sustainable Forestry” regional strategy similar to that of the Mineable Oilsands Strategy. Given the spatial scale involved it may be necessary to use ALCES to allow scenario runs to be completed in a reasonable time. We will examine at least two scenarios at the regional scale; one whereby forestry is the priority land use which then drives the level and mode of other land uses and a second one whereby the energy sector remains as a dominant resource use but the sector’s activities are conducted in a manner that is most beneficial to forest sustainability.