Kamloops Future Forest Strategy II

The Kamloops Future Forest Strategy (K1) was undertaken by the Kamloops TSA steering committee and a group of consultants led by Ken Zielke and Bryce Bancroft of Symmetree Consulting Group.  This strategy provided suggested actions to address climate derived ecological and management sensitivities for the Kamloops TSA.  Interpretation of modeling results for two climate change scenarios provided a framework that allowed expert opinion to identify issues and possible management actions to address plausible futures.

To be clear, the K1 team was not trying to forecast the future, but rather explore how significant the impacts could be on the TSA forests and their values, and design a strategy that would prudently maintain options for the future.

The main actions suggested revolved around the following three themes:

• Planting different species and species mixes than those presently used to address a changing climate.
• Targeted harvesting in vulnerable stand types, i.e., stands whose vigour is projected to decline with changing climate.
• Rethinking retention strategies to take into account greater uncertainty that climate change highlights.

Each of these suggestions appears relatively straightforward at first glance, but becomes more complex when envisioned over the landscape of the TSA.  Because K1 utilized expert opinion without subjecting the recommended actions to spatial and time related implementation, the impacts were simply estimates and require added quantification to rank their magnitude.

For more information on K1 – Symmetree Consulting Group has made available the following files:

• File #1 below will provide you with a general overview of climate change for the Kamloops TSA and files 2-11 are individual narratives by subzone.  Each provides a description of a probable future based on the climate change scenarios tested in K1 with the forest and stand types found in that subzone.

1. General Trends across the TSA Nov 12-08
2. ICHdw Ecol Narrative
3. ICHmw Ecol Narrative
4. ICHwk Ecol Narrative
5. IDFdk Ecol Narrative
6. IDFmw Ecol Narrative
7. IDFxh Ecol Narrative
8. MSdm Ecol Narrative
9. MSxk Ecol Narrative
10. PPxh Ecol Narrative
11. SBSmm Ecol Narrative

• K1 Final Report (Jun 09) – this is the main report covering the overall findings of the strategy.
• KFFS Technical Presentation (June 09), this highlights the project, sensitivities, vulnerabilities and adaptive capacity issues identified for the Kamloops TSA – to view the presentation allowing notes to be viewed, save it first to your hard drive.

For additional files associated with K1 see: BC Ministry of Forests & Range Future Forest Strategy page.