Grant: Collaborative Research and Development Grants

The combined threat of insect infestation, fire, climate change and industrial development are driving fundamental changes to natural resource management in the Western boreal forests of Canada. As a result, forestry companies, provincial agencies, the federal government and non-profit entities all have increasing responsibilities to effectively manage the forest state through ecosystem-based management approaches. No ecosystem-scale benchmarks on landscape sustainability across the western boreal exists however, making it difficult to develop a common vision of what the future landscapes should look like in terms of their composition, structure, and spatial relationships. One approach to produce these benchmark datasets is to approximate the historic natural range-of-variability (NRV) of forest conditions and compare them to current range of variability conditions (CRV). To do so requires the development of a consistent, comprehensive, fine scale understanding of the current land cover, including its condition and a parallel understanding of the natural range of variation (NRV) of historical land cover conditions, prior to natural resource industries, fire control, land conversion, and urbanisation. This project seeks to address both of these critical data gaps by developing a series of spatial datasets across the entire western boreal forest which will then be used by modellers, managers and agencies to develop and test alternative scenarios to help better understand climate change implications and evaluate the biological soundness of a range of policy scenarios.