Landscape Units in the Kootenay
Lake Forest District
Landscape units are large areas of land, generally on the order of 50,000
hectares or greater, which are the basic geographical units for integrated
resource planning (resolving conflicts between overlapping values). The
Landscape units emerged from the relatively new discipline of landscape ecology, which includes management of old growth forests. The fundamental premise is to minimize risk of species extinctions by mimicking the size and extent of natural forest disturbances, such as windthrow and wildfire. Landscape-level planning is a fundamental component of biodiversity management, which is required under the Forest and Range Practices Act and most forest management certification systems.
It is recognized that it is not possible to mimic natural events exactly. Prior to wildfire suppression, natural disturbances varied from small to enormous, with whole river valleys burning in a single year. Additionally, logging has significant differences from wildfire, due to construction of roads and removal of material from site. However, it is feasible to alter logging practices to more closely resemble natural disturbances, by introducing a wide range of harvest patch sizes, and retaining a certain number of residual trees within a cutblock.
Landscape planning attempts to ensure a balance over time of different seral stages – recently harvested areas, young stands, mature stands, and old growth. Since a forest is a dynamic entity, undergoing constant growth and death, the locations of the different seral stages will change over time.
In terms of landscape-level biodiversity, the Kootenay Lake Forest District focuses on development of two primary strategies: old growth forests (see map of Candidate Old Growth Management Areas) and the pattern of early seral areas which are being created through harvest (see map of early seral forests). Minimum requirements for wildlife tree patches within harvested areas are determined at this time as well. The Kootenay Lake Forest District was one of three Districts in B.C. which acted as pilots for implementation of the Landscape Unit Planning Guide in 1999. For a summary report Click here
Resolution of the landscape-level biodiversity issues requires a thorough knowledge of other resource values, inoperable forests, and other features of the landscape unit in question. Consequently, once the biodiversity strategies are completed, a planner generally has a complete set of resource information available, which is of considerable use to operational planning. This information, which includes resource inventories, local agreements, general strategies, and trade-offs between resource values, is organized into a brief plan document, along with supporting maps. This methodology was documented in 1998, and many things have changed since then, but it remains a fundamentally workable approach (link).
Examples of landscape-level plans produced in the past include:
The responsibility for landscape-level planning now resides with the Integrated Land Management Bureau (ILMB), Ministry of Agriculture and Lands, which is also responsible for the Kootenay-Boundary Higher Level Plan Order.