Keifer Ecological Services

• Kinbasket Reservoir Revegetation Program
• Arrow Lakes Reservoir Revegetation Program
• Silviculture, Wildfire and Forest Stand Effects on Huckleberries
• Spalding’s Campion Inventory and Habitat Assessment
• MOE Elder Creek Prescribed Burn
• Spatial and Quality Attributes of Culturally Important Plants
• Rare Plant Propagation and Restoration, Waneta Expansion Project
• Whitebark and Limber Pine Restoration in BC
• Impact of Accelerated Timber Harvesting on NTFPs
• Aberfeldie Channel and Revegetation Program
• Effects of Mountain Pine Beetle on NTFRs
• Revegetation of Disturbed Wetlands in Westpath Expansion Area
• Managing Saskatoon and other Traditionally Important Plants
• Invasive Plant Inventories at Provincial Parks
• Profile of NTFRs in the Cascade Forest District
• Invasive Species Mitigation Practices after Forest Management Activities
• Ethnobotanical Inventory, Invermere
• Reconnaissance Level Wetland Testing on TaTa/Skookumchuck Range
• Revegetation Monitoring - Kootenay 230 kV System Transmission Line
• Cultural Plants of the Creston Wetlands
• Morels in the East Kootenay, BC

Impact of Accelerated Timber Harvesting on NTFPs

Wild plants are important to residents, harvesters, and members of the Wet’suwet’en First Nation and Burns Lake Band in central-Interior British Columbia.  They are valuable for food, medicinal, and cultural uses.  As wild-harvesting provides people with an ongoing connection to their land and resources, it is a basis of forest stewardship for many.  Many people are concerned with the conservation of cultural-use plants in this region.  Some have observed changes to their quality, abundance and distribution, and many want to know more about how they are being affected by environmental and social changes such as the Mountain Pine Beetle (MPB) epidemic, accelerated timber harvesting, increasing interest in commercial non-timber forest product (NTFP) harvesting, and climate change.

This project seeks to investigate the question: what are the impacts of environmental change and forest management techniques on non-timber forest products (NTFPs) in the Burns Lake area?  Better understanding and articulating the distribution of sites which are important for NTFP harvesting (now and in the future) is an important step towards protecting these areas.  Research on methods to adequately incorporate NTFPs into conventional vegetation inventories, however, is still at the beginning stages.  In theory, an inventory of cultural-use species is really a focused vegetation inventory (Cocksedge 2006) which can be done using existing tools such as a Vegetation Resource Inventory (VRI¹), or Terrestrial or Predictive Ecosystem Mapping (TEM² or PEM³).  Existing inventory protocols are limited because they record the presence of a species but say nothing of its quality or usability, which is crucial information to an NTFP harvester.

While incorporating NTFP quality into forest inventories is still a new concept, a recent pilot project investigated the incorporation of the quality of locally important NTFP species into vegetation inventories.  It was found that the forest characteristics that influence NTFP occurrence and abundance are not always consistent with those that influence NTFP quality, and similarly that models predicting sites with abundant NTFPs can differ from those predicting sites of high quality NTFPs.  This project follows these methods, but includes species and quality criteria that are most relevant to the local communities and ecosystems.  This expands the tools required for the compatible management of timber and non-timber species, and increases our immediate understanding of the effects of forest management practices on NTFPs.

We sought to follow the principles of participatory research, wherein communities and researchers come together to explore an issue of shared interest, with active involvement and recognition of all partners in the research process (modified from McKennitt & Fletcher, 2007).  Such collaborative initiatives are better positioned to enable Aboriginal communities to control the research questions and issues that are examined on their territory, the methods used to investigate them, and the sharing and ownership of the resulting knowledge.  This contrasts with much of the conventional research involving Aboriginal communities, wherein outside practitioners have initiated, carried out, and profited from the knowledge generated (Royal Commission on Aboriginal People, 1996; Weir & Wuttunee, 2004).  In these cases the research purposes and practices have usually been alien to the community, and all too often the outcomes have been misguided or harmful (Brant-Castellano, 2004).  By developing and implementing this research collaboratively, we anticipated that the project would be more relevant to the communities, that it would be stronger by drawing on the local and traditional knowledge of community members, and that research outcomes would be more likely to benefit all partners involved.  By jointly developing protocols for how we do our research and share our results; by drawing on the knowledge, perspectives, and skills of a range of partners; and by continually assessing the project’s progress, we aim to make this research as valuable as possible to project partners while providing an example of collaborative research, and lessons learned, for interested individuals and agencies outside of the project area. 

¹VRI is an inventory based on photo interpretation and ground sampling designed to determine the distribution and abundance of vegetation resources (MOFR n.d.)

²TEM is a mapping methodology based on air photo interpretation of ecosystem distribution (MOE 2007)

³PEM is a predictive computer based spatial model of ecosystems (MOE 2007)