Historical fire suppression and subsequent increases in fuel loading have led to more frequent and damaging forest fires across North America. This has prompted much research into how changing disturbance regimes affect forests and how to manage fires appropriately and in a more natural way. Parks Canada is interested in how disturbance regimes have shifted, […]

The BC Ministry of Forests and Range has recently undertaken a Future Forest Ecosystem Initiative (FFEI) whose purpose is to adapt the BC forest and range legislation and policy to a changing climate and to ensure BC’s forest and rangeland ecosystems remain resilient to stress. This research project helps to provide a scientific underpinning for […]

For this project, the intern will be building a probabilistic model to predict how an individual emerald ash borer searches for host trees. The emerald ash borer is an exotic beetle which most likely arrived in North America in wood packing material carried in cargo ships. The beetle larvae feed on the inner bark of […]

Computer prediction models for forest fires are of great value to wildfire management. The goal of this project is to analyze the mathematical model used by the Wildfire Science Unit in their Prometheus fire prediction software package. In particular, the internship will work on the development of a robust software package which includes 3-D features […]

Western Forest Products is an integrated Canadian forest products company and currently the second largest coastal woodland operator in British Columbia. Traditionally, a tree is cut based on a logger’s observation of the tree including any defects, its species as well as its taper. Currently, these factors do not explicitly consider the products which are […]

This project will use vegetation indicators of biodiversity to define response curves for measuring ecological resilience in three forest ecosystems in central BC. The vegetation indicators to be evaluated are: 1) the rate of regrowth; 2) the rate of recovery of species richness; and 3) the rate of recovery of original species composition. The research […]

Forest soils are a significant sink for the greenhouse gas, CO2. Concerns over climate change have led to increased interest in methods to increase the forest C sink. Fertilization of forests has been demonstrated to increase productivity of many forest types and this has an associated benefit of increased C sequestration in biomass. There is […]

Extensive portions of the productive forests in coastal British Columbia display below-average timber productivity possibly due to excess soil water. In particular, conifers regenerating on some western red cedar/western hemlock sites on northern Vancouver Island show very slow growth and nutrient deficiencies after harvest. The research team hypothesizes that the low nutrient supply is caused […]

This project with the BC Ministry of Forests and Range intends to use almost entirely existing stand spatial data and snow-melt data to model early season water availability in mountain pine beetle (MPB) affected stands. The resultant canopy loss due to the MPB is likely to have an influence on the volume and timing of […]

Considerable information has been acquired on soil dynamics in areas under oil sands reclamation and a variety of models have been developed that simulate moisture dynamics and ecosystem productivity. However, to date, nutrient and moisture dynamics have been considered largely in isolation; for models to be useful in reclamation, they need to be capable of […]

Forest fire risk modeling is a new and rapidly developing approach to managing the threat of wildfire to British Columbia communities. The demand for forest fire risk assessment technology is growing rapidly in British Columbia due to the increasing number and extent of forest fires as well as the rapid expansion of residential housing in […]

In many actively managed forest ecosystems, the most disturbed locations are the areas where excess woody slash has been piled and burned. Burning slash creates barren patches, which may provide locations for the invasion of exotic plant species. The intern will study the restoration of native species to these sites where slash piles have been […]