Thank you both for being here. I have about 50 questions and time for maybe three or so. With again apologies to Mr. Henry, I'm going to start with Dr. Carroll.
I'm from British Columbia and the pine beetle is the big issue there in our forests. I'm from the Okanagan valley, so I've been on the edge of it, but I watched with some trepidation as that infestation moved south in 2006-07, in big flights off the Cariboo Plateau into the Thompson valley.
You just mentioned that Jasper has a dead tree problem. In British Columbia, that's mainly where we're at. It seems the really huge epidemic of the mountain pine beetle has calmed down a fair bit. In looking to the future and what roles government might have.... Mr. Henry also touched on this, so I'd let him comment at the end. What should we be doing about harvesting strategies, silviculture techniques, to reduce the chance of this happening again?
There was a historical aspect to this, as well as climate, where we had a lot of fires back 200 years ago, so we had these huge monocultures, even-age stands of old pines that contributed to it. Now we're in a replanting phase. I know the Government of B.C. is trying to replant some things, and it's behind in that scheduling. What I'm seeing is that we need more forest diversity in terms of species, structure, and age structure. Is that being done? Is that what you're seeing being done on the ground in British Columbia, that they're replanting different species?
That brings in climate as well. I've seen predictive maps of what the forests of B.C. will look like 100 years from now, and you have ponderosa pines in Vanderhoof.
It's a big question, but what are the sorts of things we should be doing for the future to reduce the chances of these really devastating epidemics of mountain pine beetle and other forest pests?