Generic Forest Health Surveys Guidebook

This guidebook is intended to assist field practitioners in determining forest health issues and the incidence of forest health factors in high-hazard forest ecosystems. The first section describes the attributes of hazard & risk rating and briefly outlines some available hazard & risk rating systems. Section two covers forest development plan-level surveys, and includes procedures for landscape-level forest health factor surveys. Topics covered include aerial overview surveys, classification of damage, map processing, survey for pest incidence, and windthrow risk evaluation. The final section reviews stand-level surveys. Appendices include a glossary, example inventory data & field data forms, and a table of damage agents & associated pest severity ratings.

Assists field practitioners in determining forest health issues and the incidence of forest health factors in high hazard forest ecosystems.

Effective management of tree health problems depends on early detection and recognition of symptoms. This guide includes 140 photographs of symptoms from more than 50 tree species, which can be used as a basis for demonstrating the effects of pest (biotic) and non-living (abiotic) influences on trees. It is not designed as an identification guide to insect pests and diseases of trees, but rather seeks to enable a preliminary diagnosis and assessment of potential problems, in order to promote better planning and more effective management of forests and trees.

This project was developed to identify a set of risk indicators to predict the risk of summer-ground loss at the watershed level within the Vanderhoof Forest District (VFD) and others, subsequent to the mountain pine beetle (MPB) infestation of lodgepole pine stands. This report was done in relation to the VFD annual cut of stands, and the following difficultings that operators found in running their equipment in wet versus dry soils in harvest years. Risk indicators were selected from available GIS information, aerial photographs, and local knowledge. The most effective indicators for predicting the risk of wet-ground areas at the watershed level were found to be lodgepole pine content, understorey, drainage density, sensitive soils, and the topographic index, all of whose values are available from provincial databases. The work includes information on materials and methods, results and discussion, the authors' conclusions, as well as recommendations.--Includes text from document.