Harvest Priorities. Once the increase in AAC is approved by FLNRO, it will be used to continue and expand salvage operations in order to recover the economic value from the dead Pl and to ensure as much as possible of the Community Forest area is regenerated. The uncertainty of marketplace acceptance of dead Pl sawlogs requires the development of markets for all parts of the fibre profile, and contingency plans, in order to meet potential market changes: As market loggers, we must have “green” wood permits ready to implement if the market changes suddenly. Our first priority is to focus on 70%+ Pl stands for as long as possible since Pl sawlogs are the key to paying for the reforestation program. The next priority is the salvage of mixed Pl stands through understory protection. The stands must be selected to produce some sawlogs, as well as pulp logs and to incur limited silviculture costs. The role and importance of pulp logs sales will increase substantially as sawlog shelf-life decline continues. Pulp logs can add significantly to the revenue stream, however, pulp log revenue/ha cannot pay for silviculture costs alone. The focus will be recovering pulp logs from stands with 70%+ Pl and then mixed stand salvage on stands with some sawlog revenue.
Harvest Priorities. The forest conditions within the Community Forest are such that there is not a harvest priority in terms of forest health agents or other short-term forest management considerations. Therefore, the management strategy will be to identify the stands for harvest that are in the older age classes and meet the economic and environmental objectives of the Community Forest.
Harvest Priorities. The TSR3 analysis had partitioned the cut into 2 distinct populations, pine (stands with at least 70% pine as the leading species) and non-pine (stands with less than 70% pine as the leading species). The IFPA members decided to continue to use the IFPA Harvest Priority Rule developed in previous IFPA work and committed to in the Forestry Plan. A summary indicating percent of pine volume harvested in the short-term will be produced to illustrate capacity of the land base to meet the 75% pine partition that the chief forester set in the AAC determination. There are 2 parts to this harvest rule: a short-term harvest priority and a long-term harvest priority. The short-term harvest priority allowed for stands to be ranked according to the amount of Pine volume within the stand. The stands were classified and ranked based on seven (7) classifications listed below:
Harvest Priorities. The approach to harvest priorities used in the analysis can be described as “best of the worst first”. Stands with the largest projected beetle related volume losses are high priority and within the subset the higher the site index the higher the harvest priority (Table 27). The intention is to salvage as much of the beetle killed wood as possible before the shelf life has expired. Within this salvage priority, there is another priority intended to preferentially convert higher productivity sites to managed stands first as these have the potential to provide available timber the soonest. Also, spruce and balsam leading Inventory Type Groups (ITG) are not being ignored since this priorities scheme is based on total pine volume killed within each stand, regardless of its’ leading species or ITG classification.
