Overview
The information on this site characterises, quantifies
and presents the way in which timber is shipped throughout the interior forest
districts of British Columbia. There are also summaries provided for the harvest
and species characteristics
for each interior forest district. Introduction
Trees in British Columbia can be harvested and processed in the same
geographical area or be shipped from the point of harvest to be processed in a
different area. The terminology used to describe this movement from the point of
harvest to the point of processing henceforth used on this website is “fibre
flow”. Fibre flow most often results from the need to match harvest to input
requirements of different processing facilities. These input needs might be
driven by, among other things, the volume requirements to achieve economies of
scale or by specific species or quality required for different products. For
example, the type of trees used to produce dimension lumber (e.g. 2x4s) can be
quite different from the types of trees used to produce plywood or oriented
strand board (OSB).
Characterising the fibre flow of each tree in the province could potentially be
a difficult and onerous task. One could imagine having to gather information on
each tree in the province and then track it from its point of harvest to the
destination at which it is processed. With an interior harvest of around 53
million cubic meters of logs in 2007, this might present some serious
challenges. Fortunately the Ministry of Forests and Range maintains a database
of information for all trees harvested in the province. This database combined
with certain assumptions provides the basis and ability to conduct a fibre flow
analysis.
In a nutshell, the fibre flow analysis uses
the database information on where trees are harvested and where trees end up in
order to determine fibre flow. If these two places are different a flow has been
identified. For this analysis, the harvest location is the forest district it is
harvested in and where the tree ends up is determined by the district in which
it is scaled. Harvesting will be familiar to most everyone; this is where the
tree is cut down. Scaling is less intuitive to those not accustomed to speaking
in forestry terms. Basically scaling is the process of measuring the volume, species
and quality of logs. This is required so that the crown can charge the stumpage
for the wood harvested from the provincially owned forests and for determining
the value of any given market transaction. It should be noted that harvest and
scaling information is recorded for trees harvested on provincially owned, private and
federally owned lands in B.C. Those who have prior knowledge of BC’s forest sector
know that there are large differences between the Coastal and Interior forest
industries. For purposes of analysis, these regions are often separated, which
is the case here as well. This is where a key assumption of this analysis
factors in. Because there isn’t a data point in the database that identifies
exactly where a tree is processed, the assumption used is that the forest
district in which a tree is scaled is where it is processed. On the Coast this
assumption cannot be used with any certainty due to the complicated manner in
which trees are scaled, boomed, re-boomed and transported back and forth in the
coastal tide waters. In the interior, this assumption can be used with much more
certainty as it is most often the case that the location of the scale sites
corresponds to a mill location where the trees are processed, i.e. the logs do
not often get moved shipped somewhere else once they are scaled. This assumption
has been checked and is viewed as valid. As a result, only the Interior fibre
flow is examined. Characterising Fibre Flow
Armed with the database information and the assumption around equating the
district of scale with the district of processing, the fibre flow can be
examined. As mentioned above, the analysis only examines the interior volumes.
Furthermore, the data used is constrained to include only the volumes that are
harvested and scaled in forest districts in the Northern and Southern Interior
forest regions. This excludes trees that are harvested in the Interior and
scaled in the Coast and vice versa. These volumes are not large and are avoided
for reasons of convenience. These volumes are likely more significant for
certain Coast/Interior border forest districts, but are not material on an
Interior wide basis. The Fibre Flow Model
There are four main terms used in the fibre flow analysis. These are “Total
Harvest”, “Total Scaled”, “Outflow” and “Inflow”. These terms are best
explained using an example. Here assume there are 3 forest districts in the
model labelled A, B and C.
For A:
Total Harvest = All volume harvested in A Outflow = All
volume harvested in A that is scaled in either B or C Inflow = All
volume harvested in either B or C that is scaled in A Total Scaled
= All volume scaled in A (this could have been harvested in A, B or C)
For any given forest district, the following “fibre flow equation” must hold
by definition: Total Scaled = Total Harvest –
Outflow + Inflow The term “Net Fibre Flow” is also used in this work and is
defined as: Outflow + Inflow. For a given district, the Total Scaled volume
provides an approximation of the fibre processed by the mills located within
that district. There is no clear relationship between the Total Scaled and Total
Harvest volumes with the differences varying greatly across districts. The
factors creating the differences will be the subject of future work using the
results contained here. At this point the differences have only been identified
and have not been analysed. One could imagine processing capacity and
transportation costs being the types of variables that would determine the
different volumes of fibre flows. One notes that on an interior wide basis the
Total Scaled volume equals the Total Harvested Volume. This must be true given
the above equations. Viewing Fibre Flow Analyses by District
The rest of the information in this website provides more detailed
information on the harvest for a given district and its fibre flow. The harvest
volumes are broken down into species and land type (crown, private and federal
land). The fibre flow analysis for each district gives the volume of each type
of flow and represents them both graphically and in tabular form. A fibre flow
map has also been generated to provide a pictorial representation of the
Outflows and Inflows from all interior forest districts. Please refer to the
footnotes throughout for further information on all figures. |
