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Ecosystem Restoration can be a part of good business practices:
- Certification and Market Access
Integrating ecosystem restoration practices as part of routine operations is a key component of sustainable forest management, and is integral to management under many certification systems.
- Employing your Skilled Workforce
While at the same time making a significant contribution to the environment, Ecosystem Restoration projects provide the opportunity to employ and retain skilled industry workers.
- Risk Management
Dealing with ecological issues through restoration can reduce the risk of pest outbreaks, provide a more diverse portfolio of forest products, and increase certainty of future timber supplies.
Ecosystem Restoration is internationally defined as the process of assisting with the recovery of an ecosystem that has been degraded, damaged, or destroyed by re-establishing its structural characteristics, species composition, and ecological processes.
In the fire-maintained ecosystems of British Columbia?s interior, a lack of wildfire due to decades of suppression, the absence of prescribed fire, and the application of no other intervention or disturbance processes as an adequate surrogate for the role of fire have contributed to trees encroaching onto historic grasslands, as well as excessive in-growth of trees in previously open forests.
Province-wide, this ecological change has affected hundreds of thousands of hectares, causing a reduction of ecosystem resiliency to climate change pressures and a host of other related negative trends in open forest and grassland ecosystems. These trends include:
- reductions in available First Nations traditional plants and ecosystem values;
- increased risk of catastrophic wildfire, which includes impacts to air quality;
- degraded native grassland integrity and associated critical wildlife habitats;
- reduced timber quality, and increased susceptibility to insects and disease;
- reduced quantity and quality of forage for wildlife and livestock;
- increased risk to community watershed health; and
- reduced recreational and aesthetic values.
To partially mitigate these adverse effects on Crown land in British Columbia, an Ecosystem Restoration initiative led by the Ministry of Forests and Range (MFR) was announced by the Minister in the fall of 2006. The intent of the ER Initiative is to initially target key areas of the province?s fire-maintained ecosystems, however, in certain cases, it may be deemed necessary to initiate treatment activities on other important ecosystems, as well.
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Expectations in this activity area are:
All ecosystem restoration activities must be approved though the respective multi-sectoral District ER Steering Committees who are guided by locally developed strategic treatment plans. In most instances, Steering Committees will have a priority list of ER projects to be undertaken in key areas. For the majority of projects, shelf-ready treatment prescriptions will already be completed (via another funding source) and will be available from the forest district ER contact.
Ecosystem and range restoration is conducted using a suite of treatments in varying combinations of conventional harvesting, slashing/spacing, and prescribed fire.
FIA funding will usually be restricted to:
- Prescription development and layout;
- Harvesting/tree removal; and
- Mechanical treatments.
Activity Standards
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