It was another eye-opening event last week from Dr. Burton’s presentation on “Challenges and Opportunities in Managing Forest”. Beginning from the term of “Resilience”, about an hour presentation of his talk (“lecture” would be a good term?), explaining the example of each recovery processes and their dependencies of forest ecosystem, and how to minimize the risk in sustainable forest management practices, added me tons of additional knowledge. Our mother nature has its own recovery system from the disturbances where human being is making, and creating its own ecosystem to balance out with our current activities on earth, and transforming those into an equilibrium stage. The overall trade off for the adjustment was global warming and its consequences including beetles outbreak, and forest fire, etc. The most interesting part was about beetles killed pine trees and forest fire. It is known that there is beetle outbreak in central interior, and some part of northern forest regions and increase in forest fire intensity across BC. After I heard about the outbreak and wildfire, first things came into my mine was about environmental changes and economic loss for our province where our economy mainly rely on the natural resource sector. Dr. Burton highlighted to a great extent of fire related impacts, the relationship with forest biodiversity, landscape, site series, and fire mitigation concepts together with New Zealand’s heterogeneous forests management practices.

Dr. Burton had shown a typical way of academic research type style of presentation which was very procedural and systematic approach of his findings with facts and figures. I must say that the talk was excellent. In general,  I learnt a lot from that, but, for an audience like me who does not have enough knowledge in Forestry discipline, it is hard to catch up. I wish I could have some minor in forestry.

Most components in the talk was not directly related to my research area, but, I learnt somehow on his presentation techniques in the academia. However, one thought came into my mind for my research that what if our forest management practice is misleading to unsustainable way (putting more weight on economic factors – unbalance approaches), in someway, land-cover pattern will be changed, consequently, how and what extents will be impacted to our watershed and groundwater system. I am excited for upcoming presentations because knowledge is golden.