Manage the Forest Resilience

Last Friday Dr. Phil Burton gave the speech on ‘Opportunities and Challenges in Managing for Forest Resilience’.  In the speech, first he explained the definitions of resilience, and then he talked about the different modes of resilience and the steps on how to manage the forest resilience. Finally, he talked about the current and future challenges to forest resilience.

Since Dr. Phil Burton represented lots of information, there is much new information I learnt from his presentation.  I learnt the definitions of resilience regarding the forest, which are robustness, recovery, adjustment, adaptation and transformation.

The challenges to forest resilience are various including the exotic invasive species, climate change, over- exploitation and changing social demands and expectations.

There are also some important aspects on how to manage the forest resilience. Firstly, maintain the diversity of forest such as species, genetics, functional traits and landscape. Secondly, keep continuity or provide barriers. Thirdly, address species range expansions. Fourthly, adopt risk-adverse management strategies.  Lastly, trade-offs may be addressed through zoning.

The particular aspects I found out about his presentation interested is that the three main reasons that caused the Mountain pine beetle outbreak in BC are susceptible forest age class structure, large areas of contiguous forest and climate warming especially milder winters. He also discovered that the dead trees caused by beetle outbreak are not the main reason that leads to forest fire. In other words, the forest fire is more often caused by other factors such as weather than beetles.

Overall, I think Dr. Phil Burton did a very good presentation. He explained the concepts thoroughly and easily to understand. There are many presentation skills that I can learn from him; however the content of his presentation is not relevant to my Master’s research.

There were not many questions are asked of him. The only question that was asked is requesting him to clarify some aspects about the beetle outbreak he had already made. If I was given the opportunity, the question that I would ask is that, are there any methods to control the beetle outbreak.