Forest accord
Research project aims to connect and empower woodlot owners

by Emily Leeson
Dr. Tom Beckley, a professor in the Faculty of Forestry and Environmental Management at the University of New Brunswick (UNB), is the lead investigator for a new research project aimed at gaining a better understanding of woodlot owners’ goals and the resources available to them, in order to explore new approaches to private-land forest management in the Atlantic region.

“We need an alternative,” says Beckley. That alternative, he believes, begins with private landowners invigorated by mentorship, events such as field days, new options for sustainable income streams, and an increased sense of enthusiasm for what is possible.

“There’s so much we can do on private land if we just get willing players,” he says. “We want to find out what’s going on in the heads and the hearts and on the land of people who we already identify as doing a great job.”

Throughout the Atlantic provinces, a considerable portion of forest land is in private hands – meaning woodlot owners can be significant players in determining the future of forest management in the region. There are various ways they can become engaged – through associations, federations, co-ops, and marketing boards – but Beckley says many are still slipping through the cracks, and potentially missing out on the opportunity to be part of the larger discussion.

“The marketing boards only really interact with a fraction of forest landowners,” he says, pointing out that Maritime woodlot owners actually represent a broad cross-section of society. Some see their land as an income source, and others do not, but all have a role to play.

The new project is intended to connect all those landowners and the organizations that serve them, in hopes of establishing a network of mentors and resources, and a commitment to fostering ecologically sound, climate-smart, and sustainable forest management.

Over the next three years, with $169,000 in funding through the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), the research team will interview landowners and take stock of which organizations and stakeholders are already active. They’ll also work toward garnering support for an official accord – a statement of principles for landowners to sign, formalizing their commitment to a healthy future for the Acadian forest.

There is certainly room for improvement, with most forest harvests on private lands still conducted by clearcutting. Beckley is confident that, if offered a better way forward, more woodlot owners would take it. “I think that there is this assumption that forest landowners have in their mind this big matrix of trade-offs – money, aesthetics, wildlife habitat, and legacy, firewood, and fence posts, and so on – that they have the full picture of all the possible resources and all the possible choices, and then they use their own values to rank and figure out what to do. I think it is way messier than that,” he says. “That negates an emotional component.”

A 2011 survey of New Brunswick woodlot owners found that their motivations actually tended to be related to environmental stewardship and heritage-based values. Beckley believes there is plenty of support for a shift toward better forest practices across the region. “I’m certain that we can get thousands of people signing on to a statement of principles, and feeling like they are part of the team, all rolling in the right direction, if we put the information out there,” he says.

PARTNERSHIP

Organizations represented on the research team include Community Forests International, Medway Community Forest Cooperative, Nature Trust New Brunswick, the Family Forest Centre of Nova Scotia, and a commercial partner – ACFOR, a New Brunswick forestry company founded by Mathieu Leblanc. The plan is to foster more collaboration as the project progresses. The team has already identified nearly 20 other institutions that purport to share some of the same goals as the existing partners.

“One of the most exciting things about this project is that it is a partnership,” says Anne Herteis, of Community Forests International. “Over the next at least three years, the project team will be talking to a wide-ranging group, including forest landowners, professionals in the sector, other environmental and conservation organizations, among others, to figure out how to best do this work.”

Community Forests International created one of Canada’s first forest carbon offset projects to finance conservation of the endangered Acadian forest, and continues to develop adaptation strategies to preserve forest health in the era of climate change.

“We do work within a few different certifications and standards for our projects – like Forest Stewardship Council for ecological forest management, and Verra for carbon offsetting projects,” says Herteis. “We know how those kinds of formalized standards work, but we were hoping, with the accord, to focus much more on community – responsibility to both a set of values, and our neighbours. Rather than creating a certification or standard through which we will seek compliance, we really want to support the community of family forest owners who already know their values and are looking for ways to work for a healthy Acadian forest.”

Also on board is Dr. Jessica Leahy, a professor at the University of Maine’s School of Forest Resources. Her role will be, in part, to offer an outside perspective, and to ask those questions that Atlantic Canadians might overlook. “Our landowners on both sides of the border are very similar demographically, average size of holdings, the diversity of reasons why people own land, and the diversity of the people themselves,” says Leahy – but there are significant differences.

“In Maine there is a lot less support for landowners,” she says. “Landowners just do enrichment planting or pre-commercial thinning, either out of their own pocket, or there is a way to get federal funding, but it’s very complicated at the landowner level. That also translates to a huge difference, in that we don’t have co-ops.”

In addition to probing for explanations, and pushing the research team to explain the proceedings to someone from outside the region, Lahey will be carefully observing this unique hybrid of research and community initiative, as a possible model for future efforts south of the border.

“I am very curious to see how this project plays out,” she says. “It is so challenging, because landowners aren’t necessarily experts, and they have many other things that they are balancing. I like the idea of these other mechanisms to help make it easier for them to manage the forest.”

CLIMATE CONNECTION

Underlying the research is a recognition that woodlands have the potential to play a key role in combating climate change – though Beckley points out that many of the forests in the Atlantic provinces no longer consist of the species best suited to the region, with mixed woodlands largely replaced by conifer-dominated forests. “People think if it is green and healthy looking, that’s the way it always was, but that’s really not the case,” he says.

It also doesn’t bode well for forest resiliency. With future climate scenarios anticipating 1.5 to two degrees of warming, the researchers believe that the Maritimes will be better suited to grow hardwood-dominated forests with select conifer species: Sugar maple, Red maple, and Yellow birch, along with hemlock, cedar, and White pine. Longer-lived and denser forests will also make for a more carbon-rich landscape.

“We have such a unique ecology here. The conditions that are projected to occur – with more moisture, warmer temperature, bigger wind events – it really suggests that we should be thinking about what future forests are possible here,” says Beckley. “But to say someone wants to bring back a more mixed-wood Acadian forest, that’s not to say it won’t be used for economic gain for the individual and the province.”

The researchers hope to shine a spotlight on individuals who are already adopting management practices geared toward ensuring the future health of the forest. The process will involve bringing landowners together for kitchen-table interviews – gathering information while forming connections among like-minded woodlot owners. Within a few years’ time, the researchers are hoping to have a fairly complete picture of all the resources available to forest owners in the region, and a network of forward-thinking players in the sector, as well as a support grid of others who are invested in the same principles – even those without forest lands of their own.

“We don’t want to tell anybody what to do with their land,” stresses Beckley. “But we do want to say, ‘If you’re concerned at all about where your forest is going and you want to do a better job, here’s some people who are not too far away from you, that we think are exemplary practitioners of progressive forest management.’ I think a lot of woodlot owners may have a significant asset in land, but they don’t have other capital. Or they don’t have enough labour in their household. Could we start to assemble sympathetic people with capital who don’t have land, and those with land but no capital? Younger people who have neither of those things but have labour and could do tree planting?”

Beckley believes the project will generate a positive response. The accord that is being drafted is intended not only for landowners to sign; anyone in the Maritimes can pledge their support. At the very least, that should send a strong signal that there’s a demand for a different vision of the Atlantic region’s forests. “There’s a real appetite for something like this,” he says.

(Emily Leeson is a writer and the editor of the Grapevine newspaper, a community-driven arts and culture publication serving the Annapolis Valley. She lives in Wolfville, N.S.)