• Maintaining older forests
The Kispiox Land and Resource Management Plan includes an objective of maintaining 12 per cent of the forested area in forests older than 200 years, distributed throughout the landscape. Forest cover requirements for the visually sensitive, riparian, and deer winter range zones will aid in maintaining adequate older forests. In addition, areas not included in the timber harvesting land base such as environmentally sensitive areas, inoperable forest and problem forest types will provide older forests. In the base case, this old-growth requirement was not directly modeled; thus, a sensitivity analysis was completed to determine if there would be any impact on timber supply from this guideline. Figure 7 illustrates that, while there is no short-term impact of applying the old growth guideline there is a drop in the harvest level during the mid- and long-term. (TSAR page 34)
Figure 7 Impact of changes to the requirements to maintain older forests
