Flexibility in forest management to preserve caribou habitat

Forest management must consider a range of time-scales from annual, tactical planning to multi-decennial strategies. The long-term planning that timber yields require is particularly challenging in the current context because of dynamic constraints and marketplaces, both of which will likely alter the optimality of proposed strategies. Using the island of Newfoundland and the caribou (Rangifer tarandus caribou) range management as a case study, we will first assess how a range of future forest management scenarios could be affected by protection of habitat for species at risk, specifically caribou. Catherine Beaulieu (MSc) will have the objective to devise different, spatially-explicit silvicultural scenarios and evaluate their long-term implications on both habitat and future wood supplies at the landscape scale. Outcome: Recommendations of spatially-explicit scenarios that prove resilient to a range of possible future constraints on forest management as well as tools and approaches to allow silviculural trade-offs to be examined for multiple forest uses.

Catherine Beaulieu, MSc at Université Laval
Main Partners: Kruger Inc.
Professor Alexis Achim
Collaborator Steeve Côté, Nicholas Coops