0602-C4
J.D. Mills 1
The Canadian Forest Ecosystem Research Network of Sites (FERNS), initiated in 1997, has networked 22 interdisciplinary forest-research installations across Canada. There are dozens of world-class studies and data banks associated with each installation. Originally FERNS was designed to help scientists and other professionals assess the impacts of forestry practices on forest ecology, and to encourage technological transfer knowledge between scientists. The impressive volume of data collected on other forestry-related topics such as climate, water, moisture, nutrients and ecosystems provides opportunities to further synthesize knowledge. It also provides a scientific foundation for dialogue between scientists and policy/decision makers. FERNS is strategically positioned to contribute basic scientific information to emerging national and international initiatives such as the Canadian Council of Forest Ministers' National Forest Information System (NFIS), the climate change programmes, the Criteria and Indicators policy, and biodiversity. FERNS also provides a timely opportunity to improve communications between disciplines, policy makers, the public and forest practitioners. Two FERNS research installations, the Turkey Lakes Harvesting Impacts Project in Ontario and the Montane Alternative Silvicultural Systems project in British Columbia, are reviewed.
Canada has a significant number of world-class, interdisciplinary, forest-research installations and they have produced an impressive wealth of fundamental information about Canada's diverse forest ecosystems. Many research studies associated with these installations have been productive for several decades.
All levels of our society-local, national, and international-are demanding more scientific information to satisfy complex questions about sustainability; specifically, society wants scientific knowledge about the impacts of forestry practices and ecological processes. Interdisciplinary forest-research installations are well positioned to provide scientific data for the local resource managers. The majority of information transfer has occurred between scientists, although opportunities exist for synthesizing knowledge for use by policy makers.
An important characteristic of Canada's forest-research installations is that they have been designed methodically using statistical and scientific rules for replication. Because a wide variety of agencies and interests have been involved, it has been essential to gather a range of basic data about climate, water, moisture, soils, vegetation, disturbances, and forest health. The scope of the data is far more extensive, and often more intensive, than required for single-purpose scientific studies.
Achieving sustainable resource management has been an international goal since the Earth Summit in 1992 and the Montreal Process on criteria and indicators in 1993. The mission of the Canadian Forest Service has been "to promote the sustainable development of Canada's forest resources and the competitiveness of the Canadian forest sector for the well-being of present and future generations of Canadians" (Natural Resources Canada 1999). Sustainable development is also in the Food and Agriculture Organization's forestry mission statement: "To enhance well-being through support to member countries in the sustainable management of the world's trees and forests".2 As our understanding of sustainable development continues to evolve, the research questions relating to social, economic, and environmental elements continue to become more complex. Within Natural Resources Canada's Sustainable Development Strategy (2001), Minister Goodale stated, "We will advance sustainable development through scientific knowledge, technological innovation, stewardship, and building capacity for sustainable communities."
Canada is very fortunate to be rich in its biological diversity and to have an immense forest. (Forests cover 45% of the country's landmass, which comprises some 417 million hectares.) However, the challenges created by the large scale, scope, and range of variables, are immense. One successful strategy used by research managers during the 1990s for handling scale issues was to focus funding and expertise on a few major installations. While this approach did stimulate world-class research and enable synergy between disciplines, it also tended to concentrate research data in pockets.
The limitations of multidisciplinary forest-research installations were recognized in the mid 1990s. In 1997, the Canadian Forest Service initiated the Forest Ecosystem Research Network (FERNS) to link silvicultural research installations representative of major Canadian forest ecosystems.
This paper will describe the potential linkages of FERNS to new initiatives and provide two examples of interdisciplinary successes in ecological research. It will emphasize the need in Canada for continued support of forest-research installations as a source of basic information about forest ecology. This paper will also underline the practicality of using a networking strategy to capture and extend soft knowledge3, and for developing ways of making hard scientific results friendlier.
Canada has an excellent history of conducting forest research that stretches over the last century. Traditionally, forest research focused on a primary issue, implemented a replicated experimental design, conducted rigorous statistical analysis, and disseminated information through peer-reviewed articles or internal manuscripts (Klenner and Vyse 1999). Forest research over the last three decades has generally moved from an emphasis on single-purpose studies, to broader silvicultural studies, and then to interdisciplinary ecological studies.
From a scientist's perspective, narrowly scaled studies were easier to manage. Unfortunately, these studies were inherently unable to answer broader-scale issues or more-general questions involving operational conditions (Lautenschlager 1999). Interdisciplinary installations enabled a number of new perspectives including:
The recent explosion of digital capabilities and software packages will further expand the usefulness of the interdisciplinary forest installations, particularly in data synthesis and technology transfer. New computer technology will greatly assist dissemination, presentation, synthesis, and transfer of ecological knowledge.
There are several concerns regarding interdisciplinary research installations, including:
The major focus of international attention continues to be on sustainable development, a goal that was initiated at the Earth Summit held in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. However, the information requirements within the social, economic, and environmental aspects of sustainable development have become increasingly complicated.
During the 1990s, Canada made a number of commitments to report on sustainability to its citizens and to international interests. The Canadian Biodiversity Strategy (Federal-Provincial-Territorial Biodiversity Working Group (Canada) 1995), for example, is Canada's response to the Convention on Biodiversity. In 1997, The Canadian Council of Forestry Ministers published a revised five-year strategy (CCFM 1998) that reinforces concepts of forest ecosystems:
The commitment that the national forest community made to an ecosystem approach in the 1990s has resulted in significant progress being made towards conserving biodiversity and using biological resources in a sustainable manner (Neave et al. 2002).
The driving issues behind these initiatives are:
A development resulting from international attention on sustainability is the certification movement. It has accelerated the adoption of an ecosystem approach to forest management and increased the need for scientifically based information. Today, all jurisdictions within Canada base their forest-management planning on defined ecosystems. Canada has the largest area certified of any country in the world (some 72 million hectares, or 43% of its annual harvest) (Natural Resources Canada 2001).
Canada's strength in sustainability depends on its forest resources-the entire context of forestry is changing, locally, nationally and globally. Natural Resources Canada has recognized this by establishing an immediate target to develop models and tools for predicting long-term effects of harvesting regimes in Canada's forests (CCFM 1998.) FERNS can support this effort by providing scientific background and knowledge.
The Canadian Forest Service established FERNS in 1997 to form a national network of autonomous research sites representing major forested ecosystems in Canada. Sites are interdisciplinary and multi-partnered. They represent sound research of sustainable forest management practices and ecosystem processes at the stand level.
The FERNS network was designed to facilitate the application of scientific information for a range of national management objectives. FERNS promotes long-term, forest-management research practices-nationally and internationally; improves linkages among sites; and helps to preserve the long-term research investments of forest-research installations.
In 1998, FERNS hosted an international conference, Long Term Silvicultural Research Sites: Promoting the Concept-Protecting the Investment (Mitchell and Vyse 1999). Dr. A. Mitchell summarized essential elements for sustaining long-term research, raised during the conference, as:
Today, the network encompasses 22 installations across Canada. Partners include provincial forest ministries, universities, forest industry, the Canadian Forest Service, the Canadian Wildlife Service, Forest Engineering Research Institute of Canada, Industry Canada, Department of Fisheries and Oceans, Environment Canada, consultants, and individuals.
Benefits coming from the network of installations and studies include a wider respect between disciplines. FERNS is serving as a lobby for preserving the research investment in these large installations. An appreciation of the extent and context of data and knowledge housed by scientists within the FERNS network is growing.
FERNS has the potential to synthesize and integrate data into emerging national information systems. The National Forest Strategy Coalition (Natural Resources Canada 2001) underlined the idea that providing an ecological knowledge infrastructure could be the single most important step toward attaining sustainable forest management. National information programs such as the Criteria and Indicators policy, National Forest Information System (NFIS), Model Forest Program, and climate change programs may provide visible linkages for the forest-research installations of FERNS.
Canada's forest ministers, through the Canadian Council of Forest Ministers, are concentrating on a set of criteria and indicators (the Montreal Process) that will form a common information foundation across Canada. The FERNS research installations hold the potential to provide credible, site-specific measurements and local verification of ecological models.
Within the context of the Criteria and Indicators process, the Model Forest Program has undertaken the task of providing substance to the concept of Local Level Indicators (LLI). While not all model forests are directly involved with FERNS, they do have a well-established partnership infrastructure involving 11 national and 8 international model forest associations. Through their partnership-based approaches, the model forests have been effective in sharing the burden of gathering data.
The National Forest Information System is an example of an electronic or web-based architecture for gathering and synthesizing information while protecting the jurisdictions and the integrity of the basic data. Even in its infancy, National Forest Information System has been able to present a composite of information from across the country on a variety of topics. A relationship between FERNS and the National Forest Information System will be very useful.
A new global scientific culture is emerging in which archiving and inter-connectivity of data sets are becoming increasingly important. Researchers across most disciplines in Canada are being encouraged to make their data available for wider distribution. FERNS may be able to offer an important data-management role by providing a means to synthesize and integrate scientific information across a number of sites and studies.
Electronic programs are available to help achieve these ends but it will still take considerable effort to design and flesh out meaningful syntheses. New systems becoming available for technology or knowledge transfer may include electronic bulletin boards and gateway software packages capable of searching for various levels of knowledge synthesis.
FERNS should also investigate new communication methods in other jurisdictions, such as the network of long-term silviculture sites in the United States and the European Forest Ecosystem Research Network of Sites.
Although each FERNS installation is exciting in its own right, the Turkey Lakes Harvesting Impact Project and the Montane Alernative Silvicultural Systems (MASS) are excellent examples of FERNS' history, diversity, and rich knowledge bases.
LRTAP was started in 1979 to study the impact of the long-range transport of air pollutants. Researchers incorporated existing studies on ecological functions into new projects researching sustainable forest-harvesting and research-management solutions for uplands sites in the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence Forest Region.
The synergy of the Turkey Lake scientist partnerships is apparent in their output. More than 190 scientific and technical publications have originated from this site. Studies have been consolidated into three areas-the harvesting impacts project (TLHIP), Extended Collaboration for Linking Ecophysiology and Forest Productivity (ECOLEAP), and forest health. In addition, several models-including the dynamic forest soil-vegetation-atmosphere model (ForSVA0), the hydrologic model (ForHyM), and the ion flux (ForIoM) model-have been developed and continue to be verified.
Some lessons stand out:
The MASS installation on Vancouver Island, British Columbia is a multi-agency forest research. Partners recognized the need to develop operationally feasible and ecologically sustainable silvicultural systems in old-growth forest in high elevations. An integrated installation such as MASS becomes very complex because of the large areas involved, large industrial commitments, and the relationships between agencies and disciplines.
Cooperating organizations had invested some $5.5 million in MASS to the end of 1999. The body of articles and knowledge is very impressive. The installation has enabled new forest management approaches to be implemented operationally.
Over 5000 people have visited or seen presentations on MASS. Electronic links have been formed with all collaborating agencies, and a public website has been established. And, of course, visibility has been enhanced nationally and international through networks such as FERNS.
FERNS is a practical network of large, autonomous, forest-research installations in Canada. The wealth of data and information accumulated through FERNS' tremendous volume and range of studies has the potential to make significant contributions to Canada's forestry information needs. It is also valuable for providing solid background information when developing policies and making decisions.
The concept of linking research and researchers is not new. More than ever before, credible scientific knowledge is essential in Canada's decision-making processes. Given today's rapidly growing appetite for forest and ecological knowledge, FERNS offers a network that will be more effective and efficient than the information-sharing capabilities of individual installations.
FERNS is representative of Canada's world-class, forest research. We do need continued scientific rigor, as well as sufficient resources, to organize, describe, and synthesize data and knowledge in an appropriate and timely format. The interdisciplinary installations of FERNS could provide a wealth of ecological data and opportunities to synthesize and share ecological knowledge.
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1 Natural Resources Canada, Canadian Forest Service, Pacific Forestry Centre, 506 West Burnside Road, Victoria, British Columbia, V8Z 1M5, Canada. [email protected]; Website: www.pfc.cfs.nrcan.gc.ca
3 "Soft knowledge" refers to unrecorded experience including photographs, oral information, and traditional knowledge.