Program pools resources for research: Forestry Partnership Program aims to address sustainability issues in Northern forests. (Forestry: Special Report).

A unique and creative partnership program is enabling forestry users and experts, such as Tembec and the Ministry of Natural Resources, to pool their resources and focus on maintaining and enhancing an ecologically sustainable wood supply for years to come.

The Forestry Partnership Program, run out of the Canadian Ecology Centre near Mattawa, received a considerable financial lift last spring from the Living Legacy Trust.

Drawing from their $30-million fund to support forest management research, the provincial trust awarded the partnership program $1.5 million in forest science grants. This sum translates to an amount of $500,000 a year over the next three years, which is being leveraged with contributions from other public and private-sector players.

The funds are being pooled along with a $1-million annual contribution from Tembec over the next 10 years, and combined with the brainpower of the Ministry of Natural Resources, the Canadian Forest Service (CFS) and other organizations. The funds will be used for long-term studies to improve harvesting yields and protect public forests for future generations.

The money is earmarked for a whole range of projects, among the biggest being technology transfer.

John Pineau, the program's technology transfer co-ordinator, says much of the research gathered from the 42 active projects around the province is geared toward knowledge that is useful to people involved in day-to-day management operations, such as forest products companies and government regulatory bodies.

Some of the ongoing projects include resurrecting the Permanent Sample Plot Program. The program involves the establishment of plots in the forest to enable researchers to go back over time and take very standard and strict measurements, which will indicate how the forest is growing.

"That leads into so many types of applications and data to give us a better understanding of the forest," says Pineau.

Another project is examining the commercial thinning of boreal forests by exploring what happens when certain types of trees in a forest plantation are thinned out, and what the effects are on the trees left behind.

"Usually what you get is some nice schemes in fibre in the immediate term, some reasonable wildlife habitat left behind and the remaining trees that get cut 20 or 30 years later, they grow faster and bigger in a shorter amount of time."

Some of these trials are occurring on plantations around the Timmins, Kapuskasing, Mattawa and Nipissing forests where commercial thinning activity is taking place.

"The Ministry of Natural Resources and the CFS are anxiously interested and involved in a lot of the stuff we're doing in advancing forest science."

The Canadian Ecology Centre further pursues a mandate of education.

This August they will, be staging their second annual teacher's tour, a four-day workshop and public awareness campaign involving about 50 public school teachers from across Canada. The program is designed to promote education on forests and forestry management in the classroom.

Organizers hope the program plants a seed in the minds of young people to consider careers in forestry and forest related disciplines, including natural resources management.

"There's a real crunch coming," says Pineau. "There are not many foresters, biologists, ecologists, social scientists coming up through the (educational) system.

"Forestry is now a very holistic and broad-ranging discipline. You're managing so many different things, not just fibre, but wildlife, ecosystems, hydrology and economics for towns.

"There's definitely going to be the need for a lot of talented and smart people in forestry in the future."

http://forestresearch.canadianecology.ca www.livinglegacytrtlst.org