Western Report: Forestry figures don’t add up
by John Betts

I have always had trouble with arithmetic. In public school, unable to memorize my addition tables, I completed my sums by putting peck marks in the margins and then counting them. This marginalia my teachers took as symptomatic of idleness and dismissed me as an aimless kid who couldn’t add. (Later, with the introduction of new heuristic teaching methods involving sets, my approach might have been seen as innovative. But this was not a defense available to me at the time.)

Lately I have been having trouble with arithmetic again. I cannot get the reforestation statistics for BC to add up. These are pretty basic sums: hectares logged, area reforested, trees planted, etc. 

At the turn of the century the annual area harvested was around 221,000 ha. By 2005 we have - whoops - no figures for that year. OK, and we only have provisional numbers for 2004, but total 174,000 ha. So is the cut decreasing?

During the same period, stumpage revenues hung around a billion dollars annually, but the harvest volume grew by almost 20%. So is the cut increasing? And those stumpage revenues - how many of those dollars reflect the ongoing clearance sale on salvage wood? It’s hard to pick out a trend there. It looks like these 3 key indicators are all going in different directions.

Confounded somewhat, I then compared seedling requests to seedlings reported planted over the same general period. There appears to be an accumulated 60 million seedlings missing, according to my counting. We apparently have sown that many more trees than have been reported planted. This should make anyone nervous about looking under stumps in this province. Where are those would-be saplings?

Now I am beginning to think the problem is not my counting. When I wrote a senior Ministry of Forests and Range executive asking how many hectares we have salvaged for mountain pine beetle, how much of it has been planted, and what the response has been, I received a reply so acronym-rich and jargon-dense it proved indecipherable. (Maybe I lack some literacy skills, but when plain language doesn’t suffice to answer a set of straightforward questions, you have to wonder.)

Another Ministry manager summed things up more forthrightly. “We no longer have the mandate to collect those figures,” he said ruefully. And that brings us back to those missing hectares-logged figures for recent years that I mentioned earlier. A statistical steward I know says we haven’t been this behind in the reporting of those kinds of numbers since the Second World War. And that was because Ministry foresters had enlisted and were serving overseas. What’s happening today?

What might be happening is interesting. I can’t help but notice that the wacky figures in the Ministry’s reports start showing up around the time we shift to the “results-based” model. When I try to connect the dots around this coincidence I get the same problem I had counting the ones in my margins in public school: confusion, uncertainty, and not one reliable answer.

If industry needs only live up to their own independent minimum stewardship requirements, which doesn’t seem to include prompt reporting of achievements, who has a handle on the big picture?

Silviculture planning is acutely sensitive to area disturbed. We need to know how much, where it is, where it is contiguous, and we need to know those numbers promptly and accurately. We need to know it on a scale comparable to the exceptional assault on forest health in this province. If we aren’t tracking the basic bellwethers, our information is unreliable both for indicating what we have done and what we need to do. If our statistical landscape is full of holes and slop, particularly regarding the area we have disturbed, how do we guide forestry? What does it suggest about possible gaps in our strategies and possibly on the landscape? If we are practicing world-class forestry, we need numbers we can count on.

The most common approach to forecasting how insect outbreaks may respond to climate change involves analysing historical data from a certain region to reveal statistical associations between short-term climatic patterns and the frequency, duration, and extent of outbreaks. For example, colder weather has been associated with shorter outbreaks of the forest tent caterpillar in central Ontario, and less frequent outbreaks of the European pine sawfly in Finland’s boreal forest. Warm, dry summers have been associated with outbreaks of a number of other insect species in Canada’s forests (eastern hemlock looper, mountain pine beetle, western spruce budworm, jackpine budworm, and the spruce budworm). Assuming these same statistical associations hold as climate change progresses, one can infer how the characteristics for that outbreak regime might change in response to the climatic changes projected for the region. In general, this research suggests that the outbreaks of many species can be expected to occur more often, be more extensive, and/or last longer.

This does not necessarily mean that the direct economic impact of these insects will increase - some think increased tree growth will more than offset any increased losses to insects. But there are worrisome possibilities. Climate warming may allow certain insects (e.g., the mountain pine beetle) to extend their ranges into extensive, and previously geographically isolated regions containing vulnerable host species. Overall, the uncertainties associated with climate change influences on insect outbreaks will likely affect depletion forecasts, pest hazard rating procedures, and long-term planning for harvest queues and pest control requirements.

Richard Fleming works for Natural Resources Canada, Canadian Forest Service, at the Great Lakes Forestry Centre. He can be reached at rfleming@nrcan.gc.ca.