Thank you.
I would like to thank the committee for the invitation to present.
I am the chief forester for the Province of British Columbia within the B.C. Ministry of Forests, Lands, Natural Resource Operations and Rural Development. The office of the chief forester in the division encompasses most of forest management in British Columbia and the legislation, regulations, policy guidelines, etc. that govern that, of which forest health is a primary factor.
In British Columbia, a majority of our forest lands are publicly owned. As such, the ministry has a huge responsibility, along with partnering with our first nations, for management of the land base and the forests within it.
As you may or may not be aware, in the early 2000s we had a mountain pine beetle epidemic that swooped through the middle part of our province and ate up quite a bit of our lodgepole pine plantations and also natural stands.
As Keith alluded, we've also had, in the last two years.... In 2017, 1.2 million hectares burned up in wildfires, primarily in mountain pine beetle-affected mortality areas, and in 2018 we've had about 1.3 million hectares burned up around the province, not only isolated to mountain pine beetle stands, but, again, a good portion of it was impacted by the mountain pine beetle.
In addition to the mountain pine beetle, we now have an infestation almost at epidemic levels across our north area of spruce bark beetle, which is affecting our spruce, and balsam bark beetle. As an aftermath of the wildfires, the Douglas fir bark beetle is coming through in increasing numbers and is forecasted to do significant damage, again, to the central portion of our province with Douglas fir.
On the coast, as Keith said, key species are the western red cedar and the yellow cedar—key species in the sense of first nations' traditional cultural interests, but also because of their uniqueness to their zonation within British Columbia. We are seeing, through drought and climate change, some portions of the land base on the coast where the cedars are having a difficult time with drought-type areas, and we're seeing some dieback from tops and some mortality.
I'm not painting a very good picture for British Columbia. However, we do have robust forests. We are looking at many options on how to create better resiliency within our forests, which are showing significant changes primarily due, in my opinion, to climate change. It is to the point that some of our researchers are showing that a typical beetle life cycle of maybe two years is coming down to a one-year life cycle. There are significant changes in the life cycle of the critters that we're trying to manage, and that poses significant issues with regard to management techniques. It's almost like having a new creature that we don't know anything about and asking what the best management for that is.
Within British Columbia, how do we manage for forest health? We do aerial detection. We do overview flights for the whole province as best we can, depending on weather, of course. That is a very good tool, but it's also a very limited tool in the sense that, in burned areas, it's very difficult to differentiate from the air whether the tree is dead due to, say, a Douglas fir bark beetle infestation or whether it's just the fire impact that has turned the trees red. In addition, if you're looking at specific pests like the spruce beetle, you may not see the initial attack because the trees take a year to die from the spruce beetle. While there may be significant infestation, you may not pick it up until the following year, in which case they've flown away and moved somewhere else. It's a good tool, but it's a limited tool.
The other tool we have, of course, is ground surveys. Again, it's a very good tool, but it's very expensive. It takes a lot of training, and individuals who know what they're looking for can cover the ground in a systematic way so we get good information. It's very expensive and very difficult to do, so we focus only on key areas where we think we can do some kind of management techniques.
The rate of spread we're seeing in British Columbia is faster than we've seen in history, and that results in increasing damage for both economic and social aspects within the province. As you are probably aware, B.C. communities are very much forest-dependent communities, especially in the rural sectors, and our economy is based on forestry. When we have impacts to forest health, it obviously impacts our economic wealth, and it also impacts our social ability to deal with the outcomes.
When we have unhealthy forests, we run the risk of habitat loss and the inability of some wildlife to move into new areas that are impacted by forest health. We are seeing some elements of this, and Keith mentioned this as well. We see increased fire, and in British Columbia we really are in a mode of both management and land restoration at this point in time.
In British Columbia, we really see forest management as the tool to make a difference in our forest resilience going forward. It's important to make sure we're doing the right forest management in the right places, and that knowledge is there and available to practitioners. That can be through harvesting, through silviculture, through plantations, through different techniques across landscapes, etc.
British Columbia has researchers in forest health. We have pathologists, entomologists, climate change researchers and geneticists, and all are looking at the components of forest health and what the changes are. However, British Columbia has a limited number of these resources, and with the changes we're seeing due to climate change, much more research is required.
I'll follow up with recommendations that, as chief forester for the province, I would like to see this committee consider. One is definitely to support ongoing forest health research. That can be linked to forest management, results or impacts, and precautions that can happen with regard to the research and how we use forest management.
We definitely need to have better identification, tracking and monitoring tools, probably through technology. I'm not a technologist, but I'm sure there are different ways of incorporating new technologies with regard to lidar adaptation and visual imaging. They can be used for identification, tracking and monitoring. They just enable us to get better information from our aerial overviews and ground surveys, and they may incorporate new techniques we haven't thought of yet.
Education and communication are crucial, for sure. A lot of our rural communities look out their window and see dead trees, and they are wondering what that's about. It's obviously the job of our ministry to inform them. The more education and information we can supply, the better.
I also want to reaffirm that forest management can be a tool for developing and maintaining healthy, resilient forests. We need to ensure that we understand what those interactions are for wildlife, water and other values on the landscape.