0566-A2
P.C. Ward,[1] D.A. Hayhurst and J.D. Steele
Sustainable forest management in Ontario is a shared responsibility of government, forest industry and the public. Available and accessible forest information is critical for sustainable forest management. Ontario has developed an information policy framework that describes responsibilities for creation, provision, and management of forest information. It has also developed information infrastructure to: define data standards, support exchange among users who manage forest information, and develop and share tools to support planning, monitoring and reporting from local to provincial scales. These approaches could be of value in other jurisdictions.
The Province of Ontario has a stated commitment to sustainable forest management. The goal of its Policy Framework for Sustainable Forests (Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources [OMNR]1994) is to ensure the long-term health of forest ecosystems for the benefit of local and global environments, while enabling present and future generations to meet their material and social needs.
Sustainable forest management is a shared responsibility of government, forest industry, and the public. Ontario’s Living Legacy land-use strategy (OMNR 1999) resulted from a lengthy public consultation process, and guides land use and resource allocation across Ontario’s managed Crown forests. The Living Legacy process also created the Ontario Forest Accord (Ontario Forest Accord Advisory Board 2002), an agreement among the forest industry, a coalition of environmental groups, and the OMNR that provides for a mutually acceptable approach to the establishment of parks and protected areas while avoiding net increases in wood costs or long-term reduction in wood supply. These initiatives have helped reduce conflict among forest users and have promoted a consultative and shared approach to resource allocation and conservation.
This shared responsibility applies to all phases of forest management: planning, operations, monitoring and reporting. The availability and accessibility of forest information are cornerstones to meeting these sustainable forest management commitments. Ontario has developed an information policy framework that lays out government and industry responsibilities for information sharing, and has developed information infrastructure which describes data standards, data exchange, and tools to support planning, monitoring and reporting from local to provincial scales and to support public access to forest information. These approaches could serve as models to other jurisdictions wishing to improve stakeholder access to information and understanding of forest management issues.
Ontario's forests are managed for a broad range of uses and to conserve economic, social, environmental and cultural values. To achieve sustainability, forest ecosystems must be maintained in a healthy state, and the value of the forest to all other users must be respected.
Seventy-four percent of Ontario (78.9 million hectares) is forested, and about 91% of those forests are owned by the province (Crown forests). Of that area, about 44%, or about 35 million hectares, is production forest - forests managed for a full range of benefits and values, including timber production.
The Crown Forest Sustainability Act (CFSA) (OMNR 1994) provides for the regulation of forest planning, public involvement, information management, operations, licensing, and trust funds for reforestation. The purpose of the CFSA is to ensure the long-term health of Ontario's forests. The legislation also has sanctions and penalties for noncompliance
The CFSA mandates four manuals that facilitate implementation of the provisions of the Act and its regulations. These manuals are:
Forest Information Manual (OMNR 2001)
The manuals define the responsibilities of the government and the forest industry, and the role of the public in managing Ontario's Crown forests. The Forest Information Manual in particular describes the joint responsibilities of the government and the industry for forest data collection, inventory production, and the exchange of this information to support forest management planning.
Forestry activities on Crown lands in Ontario are also subject to the Environmental Assessment Act. In 1994, the Environmental Assessment Board approved the practice of timber management in Ontario with a number of conditions dealing with environmental, administrative and technical matters. Many information requirements, the development of information systems (including analytical tools), and monitoring and reporting obligations are mandated by the terms and conditions of the Environmental Assessment Board decision.
The OMNR maintains a stewardship role for regulating and overseeing the management of Ontario's Crown (public) forests. Many of the responsibilities for forest management planning and conducting forest operations have been transferred to the forest industry under a new business relationship, which began in 1994.
As part of these changing roles and responsibilities, government has re-focused its role in regulating requirements and standards for information products and information exchange. As steward of the resource, the provincial government has become the regulator and manager of natural resource data to monitor and to ensure the health and sustainability of Ontario's Crown forests, and to maintain public access to information about the management of these forests.
Ontario has developed much of the policy direction to address these changing roles and responsibilities. However, this represents a delicate balancing act for government, (acting as the data regulator and the stewardship agency), forest industry (the forest users and data providers), and the public (the forest owners and data users).
The Forest Information Manual prescribes the requirements for the exchange of information, needed for forest management planning, between the OMNR and the forest industry. The manual describes the detailed requirements and standards for various types of information, such as: forest resources inventory, values, annual reporting, maps, silvicultural effectiveness, forest operations prescriptions, forest operations compliance, and information systems used in forest management planning.
Under the CFSA, the Minister of Natural Resources has the authority to request any information about Crown forests from anyone, along with the capability of treating the information obtained under the Act as if the Minister had created it. The Manual supports this ministerial authority and sets out policy direction related to copyright, intellectual property rights, information access, and information use. The CFSA and the Forest Information Manual maintain the Minister's ability to make much of this information available to the public, and support an open and transparent forest management planning process.
The Forest Information Manual prescribes several technical specifications that identify the standards for exchanging data, such as file organization, data formats, and attribute parameters. Technical specifications are being developed for several of the major information products prescribed by the manual, such as forest resources inventory and annual report information. Ontario's approach is to exchange data in the simplest form, which allows users to apply their own systems and technology to use the data.
One of the keys to developing technical specifications is to collaboratively work with the primary clients involved in exchanging data. The OMNR and the forest industry have established various technical and policy committees to support the implementation of the Forest Information Manual and to jointly address and resolve issues related to information management, information access, and data exchange. Much of Ontario's success in advancing forest-based information management is due to the strong working relationship and commitment between OMNR and the forest industry to exchange the most accurate and up to date data. This relationship involves over thirty companies licensed to harvest timber from Crown forests.
Much of Ontario’s efforts in strengthening forest information management has been focused on improving the data and tools available for forest management planning. Forest management plans are prepared every five years for each of the fifty forest management units in the province. Plans are prepared by registered professional foresters with the assistance of multi-disciplinary planning teams, local citizens committees, and interested members of the public. The Forest Management Planning Manual provides direction for the planning and implementation of forest management activities on Crown lands. Sophisticated modelling techniques are used to predict the short, medium and long-term economic, social and environmental results of the management options proposed.
Forest management planning deals with more than just the scheduling and reporting of harvest, renewal, access and maintenance activities. The planning process in Ontario is an integrated resource management process, which considers such interests as forest fire protection, fisheries and wildlife habitat management, and remote tourism. Support for this integrated planning effort is predicated on giving the local forest managers access to the resource data, tools and infrastructure they require. The capability to roll-up results and evaluate potential impacts on long-term wood supply, habitat supply, and landscape pattern distribution from local to provincial scales is an integral part of the planning process.
Management of forest information in Ontario encompasses:
Managing the large volumes of data mandated by the Forest Information Manual, and providing data and information to various users has required the development of data standards, information management infrastructure, and decision support tools.
Forest companies are now responsible for providing and maintaining the forest inventory on their licensed areas. The OMNR maintains responsibility for inventorying provincial parks, non-licensed areas, and private lands and for verifying the accuracy of forest inventory provided by forest companies. These inventories must be meshed to provide a seamless coverage to support all aspects of forest management planning, since these plans must consider the impact of forest operations on both the licensed area and the surrounding forests. A new standard for the forest inventory, called "Forest Cover", has been developed.
The design of Forest Cover looks beyond the needs of forest management planning and provides a generic template for describing forested areas throughout the province. This inventory will be used in concert with other geographic information sources, such as surficial and landform geology, climatic, watershed and drainage and ground vegetation data, and analysis of satellite imagery and aerial photography, to ensure that sound resource management decisions are made with the best available information.
Forest cover data for the 35 million hectares of Ontario’s production forest has been updated such that the majority of the inventories are less than 15 years old.
In support of forest and fire management planning, Ontario records and manages information in respect of other non-timber values. The public, forest industry, the OMNR and other forest stakeholders help to identify and collect detailed information about these values.
The Natural Resources and Values Information System application (NRVIS) was created by the OMNR and provides the ability to maintain and work with geographic data along with the corresponding attribute information. It provides the ability to store, maintain and access approximately 150 data classes that describe over 690 different geographic feature types such as:
Traplines
This data was automated from existing paper maps in the mid-1990s, and supplemented by further field observations. The OMNR and forest industry are obligated to seek out and update values information to ensure its currency as part of the forest management planning system. Other stakeholders can also provide new or updated data for capture by NRVIS. Over fifty OMNR offices and several hundred staff regularly access the NRVIS database for resource management purposes.
While NRVIS was designed primarily to support spatial data management for forest planning, there is a broader need to manage land-related information for a variety of purposes. The OMNR leads the Land Information Ontario project (LIO), an on-going initiative to restructure the management and use of Ontario's land information infrastructure. The LIO project is building a new way to manage land information, one which will ensure that all of Ontario's land information assets are standardized, properly managed, widely known, accessible and collected efficiently.
The Ontario Land Information Warehouse component of the infrastructure maintains land-related information provided by Ontario government ministries (including OMNR’s NRVIS data), data from the broader public sector (such as municipalities) and other stakeholders. The Warehouse is publicly accessible via the Internet, and allows the public to view and obtain information about Ontario’s land information resources. The warehouse stores hundreds of layers of land-related geospatial data. Metadata recording, data publication and data distribution and subscription services are also offered by Land Information Ontario.
Several tools are used in Ontario to help understand landscape scale forest cover patterns and the changes caused by natural disturbances and human activities. Ontario forest managers use provincially developed and designed spatial tools to support planning decisions, including tools for analyzing potential impacts and changes to landscape patterns, wood supply and wildlife habitat supply based on applying different harvest options and random natural disturbance events.
Use of these types of tools assists with planning for Crown forests and in assessing the sustainability of those plans. Decision support tools and the wealth of quality data and information inputs available in Ontario are contributing to improved planning and management actions across the forest landscape. Ontario continues to explore opportunities to share and exchange spatial analysis and planning tools expertise with other jurisdictions.
The Forest Information Portal is a single-window, web-based interface for exchanging data between the OMNR and Ontario’s forest industry, including, but not limited to, the data and information products prescribed in the Forest Information Manual. The portal will provide forest industry partners with access to land-related geospatial data; timber volume and revenue data; compliance monitoring information and other data and information related to managing forests. It will allow the OMNR to efficiently receive, verify and process data related to Crown forests at the local, regional and provincial scales. It will also serve to meet additional requirements associated with data archiving and knowledge management. Some of the data exchanged by the portal will be automatically linked to the Ontario Land Information Warehouse.
Ongoing assessment of forest health and the achievement of broader forest management objectives is a critical component of forest sustainability. In Ontario, forest sustainability is being assessed in a variety of ways such as:
The Forest Resource Assessment Policy that describes the framework for assessing the health and sustainability of Ontario's forest resources
Criteria and indicators of forest sustainability compatible with Canadian and international systems
Five year state of the forest reporting
Comprehensive, independent forest audits of forest management units conducted every five years
Provincial-scale annual reporting of forest management in Ontario
Annual reports for each management unit in the province along with an assessment and evaluation of implementation of each five-year forest management plan
Meeting these reporting requirements - across a range of spatial and temporal scales - is challenging. OMNR is developing information systems that will assist in automating the collection, synthesis and distribution of this information.
The government-industry-public collaboration developed in Ontario has greatly improved the information required to plan, monitor and report on the sustainability of Ontario’s forests, and making that information more accessible has helped to reduce the conflict previously experienced in managing public forests for multiple and competing uses. A significant on-going investment in the multi-party data collection, data management and technology infrastructure necessary to maintain and provide public access to data and information has been required to achieve this.
Efforts continue to improve the quality and availability of information, as well as the utilization of information for planning and monitoring Ontario’s forest resources. These initiatives include:
Providing one-window access to forest information - for the forest industry and the public
Building common spatial decision support tools - working on a continuum of scales from local to provincial
Strengthening the science behind the inventory, monitoring, assessment and reporting of the state of our forest resources
Using emerging information technologies to increase the timeliness and availability forest information
Improving data quality and reliability by identifying custodians and defining data standards
Ontario remains committed to using innovative information management policy, systems, tools and infrastructure to sustain its forests. Several other Canadian and international agencies have been studying Ontario’s approach for application in their jurisdictions. We expect that our information policy framework, information management infrastructure, integration of new technologies and approach to sharing information, along with the responsibilities for managing it, could be applicable to other agencies or jurisdictions. Consistent with the collaborative principles of this framework, we are pleased to share our approach.
Ontario Forest Accord Advisory Board, 2002. Room to grow - final report of the Ontario Forest Accord Advisory Board: implementation of the Accord. N.A.: prepared for the Minister of Natural Resources. 26 p.
Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources, 1994. Crown Forest Sustainability Act. Statutes of Ontario, 1994. Chapter 25.
Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources, 1994. Policy Framework for Sustainable Forests. Queen’s Printer for Ontario. 5 p.
Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources, 1995. Forest Operations and Silviculture Manual. Queen’s Printer for Ontario. 64 p.
Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources, 1995. Scaling Manual. Queen’s Printer for Ontario. 124 p.
Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources, 1996. Forest Management Planning Manual for Ontario’s Crown Forests. Queen’s Printer for Ontario. 452 p.
Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources, 1999. Ontario’s Living Legacy Land Use Strategy. Queen’s Printer for Ontario. 136p.
Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources, 2001. Forest Information Manual. Queen’s Printer for Ontario. 400 p.
| [1] Manager, Business Solutions
Services, Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources, 70 Foster Drive, Suite
400, Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, Canada, P6A 6V5. Tel: (705) 945-5780; Email:
[email protected] |