By Gary Schneider

At a recent Macphail Woods workshop, wildlife biologist Bob Bancroft led a discussion on How Healthy Forests Function.  Bob showed his usual knowledge of the issue, combined with both passion and humour.  When a member of the audience asked about how to go about restoring land, Bob turned the question over to me.  This is an issue that I have given a lot of thought to.  While there is no absolute path, there are many guiding principles that will lead us to a healthy forest.

The question always leads me back to putting the conditions in place for nature to heal itself.  For a variety of reasons, the forests of Prince Edward Island are generally in an unhealthy state.  Land clearing and 100+ years of agriculture often resulted in abandoned fields that primarily grew up in white spruce.  Overharvesting led to younger and younger forests with less volume, lower quality wood, and reduced biodiversity.  A reliance on conifer plantations made up of just one or two species left us with stands that have low levels of diversity and resilience.

One absolute is that we will never have enough money to fix all the forests that need help in the province.  Of the roughly 600,000 acres of forested land, an extremely conservative estimate would rank half of that acreage as degraded.  Drive anywhere in the province and look at the forest around you.  Very little of it would be over 100 years old and most would have relatively low levels of biodiversity.

The good news is that if we develop a partnership with nature – as opposed to going to war with it – we will be making the best use of our money and our efforts.  At Macphail Woods, we have prided ourselves on planting seed trees (as well as shrubs, wildflowers, and ferns) that will over time repopulate the area with a diverse mix of species appropriate to the site.

This philosophy jumped out at me when during the recent UPEI Field Course on Ecological Forestry, we visited a site that Eric Edward and I had planted about 20 years ago.  Everything was doing well, especially some red oak that will just keep increasing in value.  There were rare plants such as round-leaf dogwood, hobblebush, witch hazel, yellow violets, and Christmas fern, all plants that wouldn’t be there had we not intervened. 

Yet the highlight of area wasn’t what we had planted, but how those species had started to spread throughout the area.  We had put seed sources in place that are starting to restore the diversity of the stand.  There were hundreds of white ash seedlings spreading across the forest floor.  Red oak seedlings were rampant, despite the fact that the trees are relatively new to producing acorns.

In the future, more elements of our partnership with nature will emerge.  Red squirrels, flying squirrels, chipmunks, and blue jays will ably assist us in planting acorns throughout the neighbouring stands.  A variety of fruit eating birds – everything from Northern flickers and yellow-bellied sapsuckers to hermit thrushes and roughed grouse – will eat the fruit and deposit the seeds across the area.  And the wind will move the white ash seeds without asking for a dime.

This partnership is really the only way we can develop large areas of healthy forests across the province.  It is much less mathematical than planting 1,000 white spruce per acre, but it is far more rewarding in so many ways.