Grant: Collaborative Research and Development Grants

Over 300 Canadian communities depend directly on the forest for their economic survival and the boreal mixedwood region represents the largest area of the inhabited boreal forest in the country. Mixedwood forests have expanded in recent decades under natural and forestry-related disturbances and are becoming an increasingly important source of wood supply. This project will address a broad range of research questions aimed at 1) refining our understanding of mixedwood dynamics in the eastern Canadian boreal forest and 2) developing relevant and sound silvicultural approaches to managing mixed stands. These two general objectives will be addressed through five complementary research sub-projects that span a range of temporal and spatial scales. The project focuses on structural and compositional dynamics at temporal scales ranging from about 10 to 75 years and spatial scales ranging from individual trees and stands to landscape and regional levels. We intend to verify whether major compositional or structural differences exist between landscapes affected by natural and forestry-related disturbances and provide a valuable reference for establishing forest-level targets for maintaining ecosystem-level diversity and for strategic-level management planning. Secondly, we will develop stand-level silvicultural decision support tools for mixedwoods that include a fine-scale stand structure classification and a synthesis of new results from studies on mixed plantations and mixedwood silvicultural trials. Overall, this project will contribute to forest managers' capacity to conduct long-term sustainable forest management planning and to better intervene in mixedwood stands in order to exploit specific stand characteristics while optimizing growth and maintaining wood quality characteristics.