Correlated Guidelines For Management Of Uneven Aged Drybelt Douglas Fir Stands In British Columbia

These guidelines are a correlation of many guidelines for uneven-aged stand management already in place in many forest districts and regions in British Columbia. The guidelines include a statement of principles, standards, and procedures and information on applicable stands; stratification; pre-harvest cruise and silviculture prescription; cutting permits; monetary assessments; pre-work guidance for harvesters; harvest monitoring; post-harvest assessments; stocking surveys; free growing surveys; and reporting.

This report's objectives are to characterize the growth that has occurred on the PSPs on the Knife Creek Block of the Alex Fraser Research Forest, located near Williams Lake, British Columbia. Since establishment in terms of a number of variables including volume and various biomass components, and to relate the growth that has occurred to underlying stand structure conditions in each of the plots.

The Forest Vegetation Simulator (FVS) is a suite of computer modeling tools for predicting the long-term effects of alternative forest management actions. FVS was developed in the early 1980s and is used throughout the United Sates and British Columbia. The Third FVS conference, held February 13-15, 2007, in Fort Collins Colorado, contains 20 papers. They describe the use of FVS on the stand and landscape scale, and to analyze fuels management in the presence of insects and fire. Several papers compare FVS predictions of the effects of insects and disease to field measurements. FVS is continually evolving and improving in technology and capability to meet the needs of its ever increasing user community. Papers describe new methods for data acquisition and preparation for input to FVS, new economic analysis capabilities within FVS, new methods for simulating forest regeneration, new developments in calculating growth and mortality, and future plans for incorporating the effects of climate change in model simulations.

The objectives of this report were to describe the treatments applied in a Douglas-fir spacing study carried out on the Alex Fraser Research Forest of the University of British Columbia; and, to access the initial effect of these treatments on the residual stand structures.

The Farwell Canyon project was established to explore treatment options for enhancing undergrowth vegetation cover, forage production, and tree growth in densely ingrown Douglas-fir stands of the Interior Douglas-fir very dry mild (IDFxm) biogeoclimatic subzone. Fire scar and tree age analyses along with stand structure observations suggest that many of these ingrown stands were considerably more open before European settlement. Stem reduction treatments applied to two ingrown sites in 200 included logging only (L), logging plus juvenile thinning (LT), and logging plus thinning plus underburning (LTB). No-treatment (NT) areas were also established. The logging treatment was modified from standard practices to harvest small merchantable stems and to initiate thinning of juvenile stems. The objective of this report is to compare third- and fifth-year (2003 vs. 2006) vegetation composition, forage production, and tree regeneration responses to these treatments on one site. Douglas-fir regeneration density increased in all treatments between 2003 and 2006. Cover of grasses increased substantially, due primarily to increased cover of pinegrass (Calamagrostis rubescens). The number of plots with bunchgrasses increased even though mean cover of bunchgrasses did not increase significantly. Shrub and forb cover remained generally low on all treatments. Biomass of combined forbs and graminoids increased significantly from 2003 to 2006 but did not differ significantly among treatments. These early results suggest that the logging treatment, with or without additional treatments, is leading to increased vascular plant cover and forage production. Tree regeneration density is still relatively low. The thinning and underburning treatments have reduced the fire hazard and prepared the stand for follow-up treatments to maintain a more open stand structure. The stand treatments applied in this study should be combined with other treatments to create various stand structures across the IDFxm landscape,corresponding to historic variability of disturbances within the IDFxm subzone.

Workshop was organized to provide researchers with a forum to share research results, identify gaps, and set priorities for the future. Proceedings provide managers of dry Douglas-fir forests with an accessible source of information about the forest type.