Beautiful plantations: can intensive silviculture help Canada to fulfill ecological and timber production objectives?

There is growing international agreement that intensive silviculture will play a major role in meeting future demand for wood and wood fibre worldwide. In Canada, however, extensive forest management continues to be the dominant paradigm. Driven by low growth rates in primary forests and the consequent long rotations, current policies support only basic management, with little or no silvicultural intervention between stand initiation and final harvests. By contrast, native conifers and hybrid poplars (Populus spp.) grown in plantations have been shown to achieve increments of 6 to 29 M-3 ha(-1) yr(-1) in Canada. In this paper, we argue that increased production, economic, and environmental benefits can be realized in Canada by intensifying silvicultural practices over designated parts of the landbase. Indeed, the shift to intensive management may be essential to sustain Canada's competitiveness in the international forest products sector. In reviewing past work, we demonstrate that intensive silviculture may yield outputs that are competitive with many other regions, even those in the tropics. Achieving wide support for intensive silviculture will require integration of a broader range of silvicultural, environmental, and social objectives into management planning than has traditionally been the case. Such a broad-based strategy, especially where it has gained the support of communities, may be the most balanced and effective means of resolving many of the key forest management issues that face Canada in the 21(st) Century.