David Broadland

March 19, 2023

Hi Ben,

It would take a much more nuanced approach than you are suggesting to understand what has been lost. As you know, primary forest on the Coast has considerably more volume/hectare than primary forest in much of the Interior. And in any landscape, there are wide variations in natural productivity.

Your method would not capture the impact of logging has had causing or making forest fires worse, either, and that loss has been great.

For example, on Quadra Island, between 1880 and 1925, unregulated logging left a legacy of high fire hazard. There were fires in 1919, 1921, 1922, 1924 and 1925. The 1925 fire burned 15,908 hectares of 27,000-hectare Quadra Island, whether it had been previously logged or not. The 1925 fire was caused by surveyors drying out clothing near a fire. The image below, from a 1930 forest inventory shows a view of Main Lake after the fire, which is now at the heart of Main Lake Provincial Park.

In 1938, a fire burned practically everything on the lowlands from northwest of Campbell River to Browns River near Courtenay. My grandfather, who worked as head cook in a Bloedell-Stewart logging camp near Campbell River at the time, told me many stories about that fire. He said it was started by a crew working in "the bush".

Here's a more modern example, a fire started by a crew working near Trent River on Vancouver Island in 2004. The photo was taken by BC Wildfire Service.

I don't think it would be a particularly useful exercise to estimate, based on the simple numerical range you are suggesting, how much of BC's primary forest has been lost. A Last Stand for Biodiversity has already done that, using better information. The hard truth is: the vast majority of the highly productive, commercially desirable primary forest is gone.

Far better to focus on an area of interest near where you live and look for remaining primary forest using satellite imagery and then confirm it by ground-truthing. Draw lines on a map around what you find, publicize that and then settle in for a long battle to defend it.

On Quadra Island we have been mapping old primary forest for the past 5 years and have now begun to interact with logging companies whose plans include areas we have identified as primary forest.

Conservation North is working on this kind of mapping for the entire province, and their Seeing Red Map is a great start and will help those of us working at a local level to find and defend remaining primary forest. I understand that they will be releasing an updated version of their map soon. We will get it on the EA site when it is available.

On the Discovery Islands, we are taking the approach mentioned above, which involves actually going out into the woods and confirming on the ground the existence of primary forest. You can see the Discovery Islands Forest Conservation Project's map-in-progress of primary forest here.

March 14, 2023

On 2/28/2023 at 12:44 AM, Martin Watts said:

Can this be split into coast and interior (most of the harvest not regulated by AAC would probably be coast)?

We don't have the original data from which this was created Martin. But a graph back to about 2005 of Coast differentiated from Interior would be interesting and is possible. People living on the Coast may not know that Interior forests have provided the lion's share of the logging industry's spoils for the past few decades. We will work on that.

As you know, there was no cut regulation on public land until 1949, so that early "not regulated" included both private and public land throughout BC. I suspect it took several years after 1949 before the cut on all public land was regulated. Anyone know the history of the AAC?

March 14, 2023

This chart was produced by the Ministry of Environment in 2015. We are presenting it here in graphic form but don't have the original data. Yes, most (but not all) of the private land would be the E&N land grant.

We do have a record of the area of public land cut, but only back to 1970.

There are historical inventories and surveys of forests around the province from which one can get an idea of the state of the forest in different parts of BC back to 1912 (thanks David Leversee!). But I haven't seen anything that tracked the area logged in BC before the 60s.

Trying to impose an average volume per unit of area on that graph would likely produce untrustworthy, if not meaningless, data.

March 14, 2023

Not surprisingly, "dead pine" means dead pine. The chart above shows volume, in cubic metres, not area. The data is from the Harvest Billing System and it reports volumes of dead pine with little information beyond the TSA in which the logging occurred and which company logged it. Tracing a salvage permit back to a specific area would be difficult, although not impossible.

There was a large uplift in the AAC for the three TSAs most heavily impacted by the beetle infestation. The ministry claims there was also a "conservation uplift" in those TSAs.

One complaint about the salvage logging was that logging companies used salvage permits to cut healthy live trees of other species and healthy lodgepole pine, too while logging the dead pine. In the three most heavily impacted TSAs, the non-pine volume of live trees logged went down only slightly over the years of greatest salvage.

The Forest Practices Board investigated the impact of dead pine salvage in a 2009 special report.

December 15, 2021

Thanks for your question David.

Let’s move left to right across the graph. The green rectangle on the left represents the total biomass of a forest stand before it was clearcut.

To its right, the gray square represents the biomass of the stand that was killed by logging but was not removed from the clearcut. The different kinds of biomass left behind are described above. The stuff that wasn’t removed amounts to about 50 percent of the total biomass. The ministry of forests does not estimate this fraction (at least not in public), but a few scientists have. The Evergreen Alliance has used a study done by Dr Suzanne Simard to arrive at 50 percent for a BC-wide average. You can read more about that here. The methodology we are using is a work in progress. The percentage would vary from clearcut to clearcut, depending on a number of things like species composition, seral stage and site-specific factors.

Moving to the yellow rectangle: That reflects the fact that 52 percent of the biomass that is removed from the clearcut as logs becomes wood chips and sawdust. Where does that "52 percent" come from? It’s derived from the ministry’s diagram of “fibre flows,” below the graph.

Of the 55.3 million cubic metres in 2019 that was trucked out of the woods, here’s how it breaks down into different fates:

Log exports: 4.7 million cubic metres, or 8.5 percent. We are not including log exports in this account since they are milled overseas and we don’t know what becomes of them. So we are accounting for 50.6 million cubic metres. In 2019 that volume became:

Sawn lumber: 17.3 million cubic metres, or 34 percent.

Shakes & Shingles: 0.5 million cubic metres, or 1 percent.

Veneer & OSB: 6.14 million cubic metres, or 12 percent.

Other mills: 0.5 million cubic metres, or 1 percent.

Those add up to 48 percent.

The rest, 52 percent, became sawdust or wood chips.

But that’s just 52 percent of the biomass that was removed from the clearcut, which was only 50 percent of the total biomass killed. So 26 percent (.5 x 52) of the original biomass becomes sawdust and wood chips through the milling process. That’s the yellow square.

As just noted, “lumber” (see list above) accounts for 48 percent of the biomass removed from the clearcut, or about 24 percent (.5 x 48) of the original biomass of the forest. Since about 80 percent of that 24 percent is exported, that gets broken out as 19 percent (.8 x 24) of the original biomass (light blue).

The remaining 20 percent of lumber is used in BC. That works out to about 5 percent (.2 x 24) of the original biomass of the forest, and that’s shown in orange.

Clarity, right?

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