On Monday, December 2, 2024, right after a week of freezing temperatures and a foot of snow (my favourite type of winter), the Stuart Nechako Woodlot Association and the Prince George Woodlot Association braved the +2 temperatures with scattered rain showers (yuck) to check out a commercial thinning operation near Cluculz Lake.
The site was a 55-year-old pine, spruce, black spruce stand on private land that was attached to a woodlot. It is likely a failed ag lease, meaning it was awarded by the government for the purposes of agriculture, was cleared and then left. As trees do, they germinated and returned. Eventually it was purchased to be included in a woodlot. After mountain pine beetle left its mark, the dead trees were fallen and left as a pre commercial thinning treatment around 25 years ago. In 2019 around 40 ha was fertilized.
The site is a mid range site index for the area (between 15-17), but has a healthy number of trees growing on the site. There is an estimated 50m3/ha being removed in the current commercial thinning treatment. The treatment is as follows:
- Maintain between 600-700 sph
- Remove pine first, focusing on defects
- Maintain all understory spruce
The trails are narrow, around 3 metres wide, but the reach at 5 meters is not as long as a larger machine. The touch is light. Take a look at the video to get a look at the site. We have some before snowfall and some after snowfall photos in the video.
Stands like this, with a healthy understory, where spruce is vigorously growing, you can start to see the concept of Continuous Cover. Would a final clearcut ever be required? If in 30 years, or maybe less, for the second entry the owner took out another 1/3 of the dominant layer (still mostly pine) and opened up the crown a bit more for that now 40–50 year-old spruce to reach for the sun. Then the stand would have around 200 sph of 80-year-old pine, and probably another 300 sph of 50-year-old spruce. The area could then be planted lightly with Class A seedlings, avoiding the trails.
Now, in another 20-30 years (the third entry), the owner could roll back in, take out the majority of the now mature pine, leaving some to develop into snags and eventually CWD. The retained pine are those with defects, something that would or already have some rot to develop into cavities. Those spruce that were maintained during the 2024 harvest would be around 80 years old and some of them could be removed. Without a doubt, deciduous would have crept into the stand (it is there now in clumps) and those trees planted in the second entry would be 30 years old. Wait, those were Class A stock, with a genetic gain.
Let’s talk about that genetic gain and unpack what that means. If your spruce seedling has a genetic worth of 30%, that means it grows 30% more volume than natural stock over the same time period. If we take that one step further the genetic gain stock would hit full rotation size sooner than natural stock, meaning you are harvesting sooner.
For a visual, let’s tally that concept by rotation:
- 2024: Harvest the pine down to 600 sph, maintain all spruce understory
- 2055: Harvest another 1/3 of the pine down to 200 sph, gently remove some spruce to even out stocking. Admire the deciduous ingress. The stand is developing into a complex stand, it has a variety of ages, species and heights. Plant, avoiding the trails.
- 2085: Harvest most of the remaining pine, leaving some behind for habitat purposes, remove some of the spruce that is now 80 years old. Remove some of the 30-year-old planted stock and maybe there is a market for deciduous. Replant, avoiding the trails.
- Rinse and repeat every 25-35 years developing a complex stand with all the heavy hitters for old forest attributes:
- Complex Structure (vertical and horizontal diversity)
- CWD as well as Snags that will fall to become CWD
- Snags and old or damaged trees that will become snags
- Mixed Species
If we sit back and bunch ourselves into groups, we’ve got a group of people who have worked in the forest industry forever. Watched the landscape turn red. Created, managed, watched millions of ha become clearcuts because there was nothing but moss and dead pine. I was there. I walked those blocks and came home with a blue face from painting infested trees, which was every tree. It was never ending, one dead pine after another. We can look back and say ‘what did we do’!
And the other group of people, on the other side of the coin, are horrified by those cutblocks, one after another. ‘What did you do!’ You fly over BC and it is a patchwork of cutblocks.
It is only now that I am realizing what we did. We reforested the pine forests of BC. We may have jammed in more pine monocultures than we should have, pine monocultures are what we removed. But we planted billions of trees, replacing dead pine trees. And we planted at a high density. What we have now is millions of ha ready or getting ready for a re-entry. With that re-entry we can diversify the stands, increase complexity, develop old forest attributes and most importantly learn.
So next time you are in your woodlot, look at those plantations and consider a different system. Re-envision small scale forestry.
Thank you to our tour guide Mac Anderson. You can check out his ad in our latest Woodland Almanac. His contact information is amav.pg@amav.ca.
Thank you to Laurie Cook for letting us walk your forest and admire your trees.