147-Emulating Natural Disturbance with Ellen Macdonald

Nature knows best…right? So, our forest management strategies should try to emulate nature? That’s what we used to think. Unfortunately, our ideas on how to emulate natural disturbance rarely result in something that acts like a natural disturbance. Bottom line, we are not fire, and we want different things from fire, so we need to not act like fire. We have had some good ideas, and our minds were in the right place, but it is now time to shake things up. Let’s put that big head of ours to use and come up with something that would make mother nature proud.

Resources

Ellen Macdonald

Sponsors

West Fraser

GreenLink Forestry Inc.

Quotes

43.23 - 43.32: “The more complex and variable and flexible you make regulations, the more difficult it is to go and see if people are following them or not.”

Takeaways

Sustainable forest management (10.46)

Ellen concurs with the widely held definition of sustainable forest management as “managing our forests in a way that sustains the full diversity of values they have”. This differs from the old definition of sustained yield forestry which focused on sustaining timber production.

Emulation of natural disturbances (15.31)

Ellen talks about the origin of sustainable forest management in the 1980s-90s motivated by a desire to sustain a full range of values and inspired by natural disturbance patterns. Ellen believes the emulation of natural disturbances is one tool to achieve ecosystem management goals.

Nature knows best (19.23)

Ellen points out that using natural forest ecology to inform forest management goes back to the 1920s-30s when nature was used as an inspiration to understand how forests functioned and regenerated after disturbances depending on the species there to inform silviculture practices.

Identifying the real objective (28.12)

The important differentiator of natural disturbance, whether fire, insects or major disturbances is that “they don’t kill everything”. They create opportunities for trees to regenerate and create structural diversity in the forest. The focus should be on forest management plans purposefully emulating the effects of natural disturbance instead of the patterns of natural disturbance.

Challenges in sustainable forest management (43.00)

Ellen finds that the complexity of implementing regulations related to sustainable forest management is a challenge. There are also worries that some may take advantage of the flexibilities in the regulation or make mistakes in interpreting how natural disturbance effects should be emulated since it is not a well-tested hypothesis. Additionally, forests take a long time to grow, so it will be a slow process.

The old and the new (51.17)

Ellen uses the example of deadwood to explain how the understanding of different components of a forest evolves over time. Different technologies today can help us monitor, document and inventory forest biodiversity which allows for more opportunities to manage forests better.

Always learning (1.07.08)

Ellen advises learning from Indigenous peoples’ history with landscape management and the tools they use. She hopes “forest management can be viewed like science - as a never-ending set of questions rather than a series of disconnected truths”.

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