qathet Old Growth (qOG) believes that ancient forests in our Regional District have not been identified.

qathet Old Growth was pleased to hear the BC Government’s November 2nd announcement on its intent to pursue "priority deferral" of 2.6 million hectares of old growth forest.  It is also pleased with the release of the Old Growth Technical Advisory Panel's report on priority deferrals and associated maps.

While qOG applauds many aspects of the Technical Advisory Panel’s (TAP) report and mapping, we have significant concerns regarding their Map 4: Ancient Forest (depicted for qathet Regional District in Figure 1), and how this mapping skews their proposed priority harvest deferral areas (depicted for qathet Regional District in Figure 2).  Priority harvest deferral areas were derived by combining TAP’s Prioritized Big-tree Old Growth (Map 3), Remnant Old Ecosystems (Map 4) and Ancient Forests (Map 5) (to view, refer to this interactive website).  

Our concerns relate to inherent deficiencies in the Provincial Vegetation Resource Inventory (VRI), whereby age class data does not discriminate between old (250+ yo) and ancient (400+ yo) forests, and ages assigned to old growth stands are unreliable and often underestimated (therefore requiring on the ground identification using tree core analysis).  Our review of the spatial data for qathet Regional District (qRD) indicates that these deficiencies have likely resulted in a significant underestimation of extent of ancient forest occurring in qRD, with far fewer priority deferral areas  (Figure 2) being identified by TAP as a result.

1 According to the Old Growth Strategic Review, ancient (400+ year old) forests have ancient genetic material and are repositories of biota and processes we may not even know or understand. This makes them an extremely important buffer against species extinction, climate change, and lost future opportunities. These “ancient forests” are globally unique, rare, and contain species as yet undiscovered, and many of these ecosystems and old forests are non-renewable within any reasonable time frame.  Many of these irreplaceable forests are in the timber harvesting land base and are subject to logging,  

2 Holt R., Price, K., Kremsater, L., MacKinnon, A., and K. Lertzman  (2008). Defining old growth and recovering old growth on the coast: discussion of options.  

3 Report prepared for the Ecosystem Based Management Working Group . 

4 Old Growth Technical Advisory Panel (2021).  Priority Deferral Areas: An Ecological Approach.  

For reasons outlined in Box 1 below, we believe that Figure 3 is a more accurate representation of the likely extent of ancient forest in the qRD, and that these areas should be included in TAP’s priority deferral areas mapping (as illustrated in Figure 4), unless otherwise ruled out by groundtruthing via tree core analysis.     

In qRD the stakes are high in this regard, as most old growth logging is currently taking place in higher elevation remnant forests that are more likely to be ancient (most of the lower elevation, easily accessed forest having already been logged).  This is exemplified by the Freda Ancient Forest Cutblock Report which documents trees between 800 and 1200 years old felled in a recent WFP cutblock on Mount Freda; the VRI assigned age for this stand was 351 years  (also see attached Powell River Living article); 

Figure 5 shows that a number of old growth stands within proposed Western Forest Products (WFP) cutblocks fall outside TAP’s currently proposed priority deferral areas.   qOG believes there is a significant probability that these stands are actually ancient, and that at a minimum groundtruthing of the ages of these stands is urgently required.  Similar cutblocks proposed by other licensees require the same treatment.  

qOG respectfully asks for these concerns about underrepresentation and mislabelling of ancient forests prior to finalizing priority deferral areas for qRD, and provide the public and First Nations with a methodology detailing how this will be done given the absence of reliable spatial data. We ask that you use  the precautionary application of surrogate data (such as we did in generating Figure 2), and comprehensive groundtruthing via tree core analysis.

Mount Freda is in the traditional territories of the Tla'amin and shíshálh Nations. They could possibly be some of the oldest forests in Canada and apart of the oldest living closed canopy forests in the world.