(2018) A submission to the Forest Inventory Program Review Panel

Submission by Anthony Britneff and Martin Watts

Our submission is based on a number of questions originally submitted by the opposition forest critic to the forest minister during the 2014 and 2016 Estimates Debates and on the ministerial responses to those questions prepared by MFLNRO&RD for the forest minister.

While FAIB managers seem to consider the 2014 and 2016 Estimates Debate questions to be some sort of personal condemnation of staff work, the questions are simply a reflection of real issues encountered in the course of completing contracts for clients and issues that FAIB managers chose to ignore, such as:

• MFLNRO&RD data management problems were identified when validating MFLNRO&RD data under contract for FAIB for use in parameterizing1 VDYP7 and problems identified when preparing data for PrognosisBC calibration under a contract for RPB,

• SIBEC problems were identified while under contract to RPB to assess the use of SIBEC data for planning and investing in silviculture activities under the LBIS and,

•SIBEC, TASS/TIPSY, biomass conversion and access to data problems were identified during the quantification, validation and verification of forest carbon offsets projects to ISO standards, which require uncertainty to be documented and, if possible, quantified in order to account for it.

In this submission, we go through the questions on the DVD (provided separately) in reference to the forest minister’s responses, while adding any relevant updates. We also incorporate these subject areas:

• Individual tree volume,

• Additional ground sample programs and the analyses associated with them,

• The culling of the PSPs,

• The debate between the YSM and SDM programs and,

• The TSR and AAC determination processes with respect to VRI attribute adjustment, VRI

statistical analysis, G&Y model assumptions and the use of monitoring data.

A submission to the Forest Inventory Program Review Panel (2018).pdf