1) What new information or knowledge did you learn from this presentation?

I wanted to start off by highlighting a few new terms that I learned from Dr. Phil Burton that were imperative to understanding the presentation. Resilience refers to the ability of a system to persist under pressure, following stress, disruption or disturbance by absorbing change, disruption or disturbance. This can be accomplished by 1) robustness; resistance to change, 2) recovery; reliable return to previous state, 3) adjustment; some components, structure, or functions change, 4) adaptation; major, long-term adjustments, and 5) transformation; most components or structure changed but some function is retained. Ecological resilience contains multiple stability domains and widths of domains, as well as diversity within and among system states. Adaptive capacity is the ability to remain in a stable domain, despite changes in the landscape or environment.  Adaptation pathways are often achieved through behavioural or physiological plasticity, genetic diversity, migration or subsuitability.

When a system is disrupted it will rarely return to what is was before. If the system gets pushed past the threshold of resistance into an alternative state, we call this degradation and restoration is required to nudge it back into the normal range of variability. In British Columbia, we just had two bad fire years and consequently, forest recovery may be compromised. This is largely due to forest mismanagement. Colonization lead to increased fire suppression which resulted in homogeneous logepole pine forests with similar stand ages that are highly susceptible to pest infestation and fire outbreak. Previously, we also learned from Dr. Roy Ray how silviculture practices are also leading to artificially homogeneous stands through the use of herbicides that prevent the growth of deciduous species. Although natural regeneration or recovery ability is good in our forests (cut forests typically return to forests) these industrial management practices often artificially modify this natural regeneration to be more conducive to future resource extraction. To improve resiliency to logging and silviculture activities we can take advantage of snowpack and frozen soils to limit soil disturbance, as well as leave feathered edges, variable retention, and leave wildlife patches.

Determining whether natural (successional) recovery is feasible or if assisted recovery is necessary can be determined using a threshold of the severity of disturbance. Once it is determined whether an area requires assisted recovery, planning and management actions can be undertaken to ensure the forest returns to the normal range of variability. Salvage logging, planting, and prescribed burns could be some required management actions.

North of Prince George on the banks of the Williston Reservoir in the drawdown zone is an area that used to be a boreal forest but has since been converted into bare ground. This once resilient boreal forest has been converted to bare earth because the area is under approximately 9m of water for most of the growing season then exposed to drought during the summer.

2) Are there particular aspects of the presentation you enjoyed or intrigued you and are there others that could have been improved?

I thought Dr. Phil Burton’s presentation was pretty definition heavy and technical. I thought that he did a good job of explaining the major definitions but used forestry jargon and codes that went right over my head. The entire presentation seemed to be prepared for foresters who have already have a baseline knowledge of forest ecology and silviculture, not for an audience of diverse disciplines. As I have no forestry background, this unfortunately meant that I could not fully comprehend Dr. Burton’s entire presentation. Had I had a baseline knowledge of forestry, I probably would have found this presentation quite enlightening and educational.

3) Are there components of the research that would be applicable or relevant to your own

Master’s research?

I believe that incorporating resilience into conservation planning is very important but perhaps it should be incorporated into protected area management plans rather than in determining conservation prioritization. For example, in many of our protected areas fire suppression resulted in a vast homogeneous forest of logepole line which was highly susceptible to bark beetle and fire outbreak. This is a prime example of how poor management plans (fire suppression) decreased the resiliency of the environment. Protected area management plans should seek to avoid such situations and fortify ecosystem resiliency.

4) How well did the speaker respond to questions and is there a question you would have asked given the opportunity?

I thought that Dr. Phil Burton did a good job of answering questions but once again was very technical in his responses. I would have appreciated some more simplicity in his presentation and responses so that they were understandable to a layman.

I would have liked to ask Dr. Burton, now that we are having these massive fire outbreaks, are we not going to end up with massive stands of similarly aged trees with low diversity again? How are we ensuring that the mismanagement mistakes of the past don’t happen again in the future? What is a realistic time span to create a healthy, naturally resilient and heterogeneous forested landscape?