Thank you both for coming here today. It has been very interesting. I learn a lot at these committee meetings. I learned from Dr. MacLean. I know that, in British Columbia, the western spruce budworm eats Douglas fir and now, I find that the eastern spruce budworm eats balsam fir. I would ask you why it isn't called the fir budworm, but I wanted instead to go to your comments about forest resilience, planning for the future and perhaps talk about a federal role there.
As Ms. Wallin was saying, in British Columbia, we have the mountain pine beetle epidemic that has radically changed our forests and the future of our forest industry. Not only did it kill a lot of trees, but the salvage operations afterwards produced a lot of clear-cuts. I'm sure a lot of those clear-cuts are being replanted to lodgepole pine instead of a mix.
There was a lot of concern registered by forest scientists, at the time, about what these forests would look like in the future, if we continued that salvage the way the plans were. As you know, lodgepole pine is a seral species that harbours all these young firs and spruces, which may be 80 or 100 years old sometimes. When we clear-cut the dead pines, we lose 50- and 80-year-old very diverse resilient forests underneath.
Could you expand on your ideas about the silviculture aspects of that? How should we be planning for the future, with how we design what we're planting, for the biodiversity of those forests and how that might help us with future insect infestation?