What happens to the areas of Canada’s forests that have been impacted by full-tree harvesting? According to international rules the term ‘deforestation’ only occurs when a forest is converted into another land use, like a shopping mall, farm or housing development. We don’t count formerly forested areas that are now barren as deforested, if the area remains designated for forestry. But could it, should it be classified as forest degradation?
Our own Senior Forest Conservation Manager, Dave Pearce unpacks Wildlands League’s 2019 Logging Scars report on the subject. We discuss the genesis of this pivotal report. What kickstarted our investigation into areas that were still barren 30 years or more after logging? What did we assume going into this, and what did we discover? The findings may surprise you.
Check out the Logging Scars webpage to read the report and see the eye-opening images.
Make sure to check out the show notes on the podcast webpage for more links and helpful resources.
You can help this community grow by sharing the podcast with your friends.
What happens to the areas of Canada’s forests that have been impacted by full-tree harvesting? According to international rules the term ‘deforestation’ only occurs when a forest is converted into another land use, like a shopping mall, farm or housing development. We don’t count formerly forested areas that are now barren as deforested, if the area remains designated for forestry. But could it, should it be classified as forest degradation?
Our own Senior Forest Conservation Manager, Dave Pearce unpacks Wildlands League’s 2019 Logging Scars report on the subject. We discuss the genesis of this pivotal report. What kickstarted our investigation into areas that were still barren 30 years or more after logging? What did we assume going into this, and what did we discover? The findings may surprise you.
Check out the Logging Scars webpage to read the report and see the eye-opening images.
Make sure to check out the show notes on the podcast webpage for more links and helpful resources.
You can help this community grow by sharing the podcast with your friends.
Welcome to the Clear Cut. Hi, I'm Janet Sumner, Executive Director at Wildlands League.
Kaya Adleman:And I'm Kaya Adelman, Carbon Manager at Wildlands League.
Janet Sumner:Wildlands League is a Canadian conservation organization working on protecting the natural world.
Kaya Adleman:The Clear Cut is bringing to you the much-needed conversation on Canadian forest management and how we can better protect one of Canada's most important ecosystems, as our forests are reaching a tipping point.
Janet Sumner:So good morning, kaya. I'm happy to be here with you. It is absolutely raining outside. That's because spring has sprung here in the Toronto region. Actually, I'm in the Scarborough Bluffs and I got a chance to watch the apocalypse eclipse or eclipse apocalypse or whatever you want to how it was being treated the other day, and I'm very near to the Scarborough bluff so you could see the uh, the area of totality moving across the lake. I wasn't in the area of totality, but I, I could see it out on the lake, which was actually really, really cool. I, I totally enjoyed that, did you? What was your experience? Were you or did you have clouds?
Kaya Adleman:No, we didn't, we actually. So, um, I'm in Montreal and we were in the area of totality. Um, and it's also, just side note, very cool that you got to see like the eclipse kind of move across um, lake Ontario. But, um, I went to Mount Royal park for an hour with my eclipse glasses and it was really cool, like it. Um, it was a little bit cloudy, a little bit obscured, but you could, really you could see it pretty, pretty well, um, I would say, and it was cool to watch also in the background, like the light change over time. Um, and it felt like there's, it was packed. There were so many people there, a, A lot of people had traveled to Montreal to watch the eclipse and they were actually having an event in Parc Jean Drapeau and the metros were so packed.
Kaya Adleman:Whoever got there early, I guess, was very lucky and could enjoy all the events and festivities there. But you could see it pretty well if you just stepped outside your home and looked up at the sky. It was pretty cool and it felt like a very human moment, kind of reminded me that we're all just living on a planet, um, spinning hundreds of millions of kilometers per hour through space, and it made, I don't know, makes you feel. You know we're just like all the people living on earth.
Janet Sumner:Yeah, there was a lot of feelings of connection, I think, that day and it was interesting on all the different social channels to watch your friends. Some were on balconies with their kids, some were out at a park or a beach, and I saw one picture that made me laugh enormously was one of our board members. He posted this picture of clouds and he goes oh yeah, I can totally see it distinctly. It was very, very tongue in cheek, you know. It's like obviously the eclipse had come and he was just looking at cloud cover when he posted that it was so distinct and colorful and amazing and used all the adjectives that were used on all the images that were actually amazing and et cetera. So that was eclipse day.
Janet Sumner:But today we're going to dive into a report that was done by Wildlands League a number of years ago but is having influence on today's current conversations, and that's a report called Logging Scarves. And the reason it's having an important impact on conversations today is because Canada is considering, is actually formulating, how to define degradation, deforestation and degradation for forestry. And this is happening because the European Union has a DR on deforestation and degradation, saying that they don't want to take fiber from places that are from forests that are degraded or deforested. So the work of Wildlands League on this, and led by Trevor Hessling as our policy director, was groundbreaking and it really is having reverberations to this day and is impacting and is a reference point for us in terms of our work that we're doing. On the deforestation and degradation definition, sure that it incorporates the fact that we have a legacy after harvesting that suggests that the parts of the forest are not coming back and are not. We don't have this magical wand that we wave, that when we cut trees down, that they miraculously regrow a hundred percent of the forest, and so we need to be much better at accounting for that.
Janet Sumner:Anyway, so this report is really good and I wanted to make the point before we start in and I think you'll hear this there is a sort of a passing reference to it, but just so it's clearly understood is that when we did the exercise, or when Trevor did the exercise, it was about gathering a lot of Landsat imagery and some of the best imagery that we could get Landsat imagery and some of the best imagery that we could get and some of that allowed him to go down to a 40 centimeter resolution, which was fantastic. Most of Canada's I think all of Canada's resolution across the country at a national level is at 30 meters. So this 40 centimeters was was a very different analysis and we were able to look at that at over 200, close to 300 sites.
Kaya Adleman:But the important part was mapping that. That's the mapping that the federal government does specifically yeah, the 30 meter one.
Janet Sumner:yeah, exactly now.
Janet Sumner:Um, after he did all of that work and and hand drew lines, a computer drew lines etc.
Janet Sumner:To figure out what the spatial geography was of the areas that looked to be barren or without trees.
Janet Sumner:And it wasn't just without trees but it was without trees where you should have had trees. So, for example, if it was a wetland, we weren't expecting to have trees there and we didn't factor those in, but areas that we expected to see trees or where tree regrowth should have happened, we were looking at how much of that was barren or where tree regrowth should have happened. We were looking at how much of that was barren. Then he decided to do a representative sample so that the ground truthing of this wasn't just oh, you know, let's go to my 10 favorite sites, but rather I want to make sure I've got a representative of the age class, the forest type, the length of time it hasn't been logged, the length of time when it was logged, those kinds of things. So he did the math on all of that and then went out into the field and ground truth or field tested the results and refined those based on what he found in the bush no-transcript piece for us on carbon as well.
Kaya Adleman:Yeah, I'm glad that we're adding this work to the conversation on our podcast because we have heard before we've had guests talk about how you can look at Google Maps and see logging scars and see the footprint of logging scars all across Canada If you zoom in on the boreal forest. But this work really kind of hones in and goes over those impacts with a fine tooth comb at a site specific level.
Janet Sumner:Yeah, exactly, all right, kaya, I'm very happy today that we're going to be talking about one of the products that Wildlands League has put out in the last 10 or 15 years that I just really really love. It's groundbreaking, it's a view of the forest that most people don't get, and I'm super stoked to be talking about this today, and I'm glad that you and I are here to dive into this together.
Kaya Adleman:Yeah, me too. It was. Actually I had to actually dive into the details of this product for my interview with Wildlands League, so I'm excited to be able to put that knowledge and information to good use and maybe learn some more things in the process.
Janet Sumner:Right and to help us walk through and tell the story of how it came into being. And the story that it tells is going to be Dave Pierce, who works for Wildlands League. And Dave, tell us a little bit about yourself and who you are and what you do for Wildlands League. And Dave, tell us a little bit about yourself and who you are and what you do for Wildlands League.
Dave Pearce:I'm a senior forest conservation manager. I've been around Wildlands League longer than Janet by about a month, maybe two over 20 years. And I started as a forest conservation analyst, working with um weird software called svum that analyzes the forest. Uh is used in forest management planning uh.
Dave Pearce:But I've got a background in a master's in forest conservation and an interest in forestry and I've actually done some hands-on micro logging up in the north of Ottawa, in the Gatineau Valley of Quebec and yeah. So I would describe my work as being a forestry nag, trying to keep on top of the forest industry to obey the rules that uh the Ontario government has, uh, but also go beyond that to uh to where there's uh there's gaps in those rules around caribou protection especially. So I work with uh within the forest stewardship council um framework of forest certification, um, which is a voluntary um framework of forest certification. Um, which is a voluntary um measure that uh forest companies can comply with and get a stamp of approval, or uh to ensure uh or uh, yeah, ensure that their products are from well-managed forests.
Janet Sumner:Yeah, can you tell us something about the man, the myth, the legend, like what else about Dave Pierce?
Dave Pearce:I think I got interested. So I grew up in the Ottawa Valley and my, my family ran a very small kind of tourist operation. We had a campground and a marina and cottages on a lake and we had about 40 acres of land. Um, and one of the turning points in my life was in the, when I was less than 10 years old. Uh, my dad and his business partner were a bit short of money and they decided to uh sell off logs. From there was a quite a nice red Oak stand on part of the property that had been farmed like a hundred years before. So red Oak had kind of second growth red Oak, but it was nice size.
Dave Pearce:And I remember logging trucks, uh in the wintertime leaving our property one after another, and it kind of broke my heart actually, uh, to see those logging trucks leaving with this, these beautiful trees, and to see what, what was left on the landscape. It wasn't, I think they what we'd term that high grading. Now they just went in, took all the Oak left, what was left, you know Birch and Poplar and whatnot, and it became a very scrubby forest after that. So it wasn't a sustainable forest management in any uh in any way. Uh, and then I went on to study environmental studies at uh environmental science at Trent university, um, kind of generally, but um, and I did a stint doing international development abroad and I um kind of a gen X wandering around kind of existence for a few years and I really thought where my interest in international development and social development in general and environmental concerns kind of came together was in forestry, because I thought this is an industry that has the potential to be the most sustainable source of of wealth generation.
Dave Pearce:You know, um, and I say the potential because we see, uh, a lot of claims that it's sustainable, but uh, as we know, uh from our work in the wild lands league, it doesn't, um doesn't always measure up, so, uh. So I thought, ha, aha, this is my path, and I was in my 30s by the time I. I kind of had that aha moment. Um, it was during lands for life, and I heard somebody speak, I think, about logging and and, uh, sustainable logging and and complementing protected areas. So I thought, oh, this is, this is pretty cool. So I went off to um as a mature student, to the masters of forest conservation program at u of t, and then soon after I left that program, I got a job with wildlands league and I've kind of been on that uh, that path to uh to um realize the realized the potential of sustainable forest management ever since.
Janet Sumner:That's pretty cool. I've known Dave, as you said. He's been at Wildlands League about I'd say it was three months longer than I had, because I started in December. I think you started in September, maybe October, I don't know Anyway, at least a couple of months. So we've known each other over 20 years now.
Janet Sumner:Yeah, and one of the great benefits of my life is Dave's sense of humor. Dave is in our office responsible for most of the dad jokes and he keeps us laughing, but he also keeps us alive when we're out in the bush. There's many times we've been out there in nature, where we often go to ground truth and figure out what's going on on the land, and we spend time in the places that we work on, and whether it's, you know, camping on the shores of Hudson Bay or in a provincial park down off of the shores of Georgian Bay, or whether we're in Algonquin, dave is always there, ready to help navigate and help us understand the natural world. So he's actually one of our natural history folks that can help us understand what we're looking at and how we're working on the land, and he's an enormous asset to Wildlands League, and so it's been my great pleasure to work with him over these 20 years.
Kaya Adleman:So thanks, dave, thanks I remember I was gonna say I remember, uh, last summer, when you guys went up to go look at polar bears, um in james bay, uh there was, there was some disagreement over some equipment that was too heavy that day was trying to bring on the on the charter flight that was too heavy to to pack. So that's one of my first experience, my, my first memories of Dave.
Janet Sumner:I think that might've been his, his version of a wilderness toilet.
Kaya Adleman:Yeah.
Janet Sumner:So, yeah, Dave's known for making the most exquisite wilderness toilets, but he had outdone himself this time and we had to leave behind some of the equipment that he had for for his creation. It was really quite creative.
Dave Pearce:I was. I was going to say, Jan, you forgot about one of my key contributions is doing the food but then also digging the latrine, so I like to think of it as a full food system through the full cycle.
Janet Sumner:Yeah, Dave is responsible for all of our food when we're traveling as well, so he does a great job of that as well. Except for the time he tried to feed us guava paste on the last day. That didn't go too well, but other than that, dave is great to travel with and he's a stalwart for the organization. So that's a little bit about Dave. So 1990 was my very first Earth Day. I was working at Pollution Probe, I was working on issues around waste management and toxics in the Great Lakes and pesticides and all that kind of fun stuff. I hadn't yet graduated to working on carbon or nature or thinking about all the great work that we do in terms of protecting areas at Wildlands Lake.
Janet Sumner:But 34 years later, we still very, very much need an Earth Day, because we need environmental groups and the public, and one of the great things that I've seen happen in my 34 years working on environmental issues is this transition where the public is even more engaged, where we have a democratization. That's happened because of the internet, because of AI, because of all of these ways in which we can now see into the world and see what's going on, and so I'm more encouraged than ever that the public and the people are paying attention and are hungry for information, and if you're hungry for information, you want to be listening to the podcast and you want to be supporting the podcast. So anything that you can do on this Earth Day to help us keep the podcast going would be greatly appreciated. Thanks so much for listening and tell all your friends about it, thank you. So we're going to start in on a publication that we put out a few years ago. It's called Logging Scars. It's on the internet. You can find it. It's wwwloggingscarsca.
Kaya Adleman:Has its own website.
Janet Sumner:Yeah, there's lots of information there. It has its own website because it's got a lot of images, et cetera. Dave, maybe you can talk a little bit about why we did this and maybe the generation of that.
Kaya Adleman:How did it come to be?
Dave Pearce:Yeah, well, we do a lot of flying over northern Ontario, as Janet kind of alluded to, and we've been to the Hudson Bay Coast a few times and to regularly go to Indigenous communities above the cut line. So we see the whole transition from uh actively, you know, you could say shared landscape between forestry, mining, hydroelectric development, um, you know, settlement, that of agriculture in in, uh, the industrial part of the forest land, and then and then flying and we see the whole transition into intact forest. So the it's quite stark actually, if you've ever have a chance to do it. Um, but uh, during these flights, uh, one of our colleague, uh colleagues, trevor, trevor, hess, link, um especially and we'd all noticed this, but he, he really keyed in on this is this pattern of they look like older, cut over areas, you know, you can see where the young trees are growing and then within that sort of a system of lines which, would you know, we're like, oh, there's the old logging roads and then beside the lines or or intersecting the lines, he's got almost like cross hatches, of kind of rectangular square areas.
Dave Pearce:And Trevor had his daughter was six years old I think at the time and very active and getting into a lot of minor injuries and some not so minor, so lots of stitching, and he said they look like scars. It looks like the scars on my daughter. They look, you know, and he started calling them logging scars and so he had a lot of questions, like we all did how old are they? You know, how long do they persist? And you know, um, uh, how much of an area do they cover? And what? You know what precise mechanism of logging causes these?
Dave Pearce:Um, and I have to admit I was a bit um, dismissive maybe is a strong word, but I, I based, and we had some conversations with forestry advisors like um, in the field and uh, and some folks that were on our board, and they were like, oh, you know, they'll grow back. You know, those, those are temporary features. You know, there's probably only a few years old. They'll grow back. You know, they'll all fill in. Um, and I, I have to admit I kind of bought into that rhetoric because I want forestry to be sustainable. You know it could be sustainable, but Trevor, he was not buying it. Uh, he was like no, no, I want to find out. You know, there's a lot of assumptions here. You know, if you take a forestry company and even our forestry advisors. Word for it, that's a lot of assumptions.
Dave Pearce:So he wanted, he really wanted to dig into it. And then he started having conversations with Janet about you know, I really want to go up there, uh, uh, and you know I'll, I'll do the field trip, you know, field work and verify and we'll do the historical research. And and uh, he started looking at satellite imagery and um forest resource industry inventory imagery, high resolution digital photos, and started mapping out, sketching out a bit of a plan to go up and verify. And I think you know, in the preliminary investigation that he was doing, he found out through logging records that some of these sites were, you know, more than 20. And then it's kind of like, well, what the heck? You know, uh, they're not that ephemeral, they're, they're, you know. So, anyways, that was kind of the genesis. And then, and then I think we all sat around kicking the tires and what this kind of this project might look like and uh, but he was, he was bound and determined to go up there and and um and find out what really, what was going on.
Janet Sumner:Yeah, and it's interesting, I was kind of in Dave's camp as well, because when you looked at it, it was like some of these areas, as you said, were maybe 20 years old, so you did have a lot of regeneration that was successful. You could see trees. It wasn't just a barren landscape, I mean, clearly they had been cut but trees had come back, trees had come back and so, but then you saw these lines going through the forest and then these kind of zones where it looked like there might be some berries or things, but it wasn't full trees, and so they looked like bear patches as well. And and I agree with you, I have this scar on my hand and I can look at it and I can see it's from a skating, playing hockey kind of thing, and I could see, um, that it's got this long line and then these hatch marks across it, and that's what they kind of looked like from the air.
Janet Sumner:And I remember thinking to myself, well, I don't know, they don't look that big, it doesn't look like that much of a problem. And so I thought, okay, well, trevor, if you really, really and he was he was bound and determined to figure out what this was, and so I was. Well, I guess we'll let you go and help design a project.
Dave Pearce:I remember being fairly skeptical until I think that first summer he came back and said you know, he's been looking at 30, 35-year-old cuts and he had the drone footage and I was convinced. I feel like, oh my goodness, this is, this is a big problem yeah, it was very compelling, I think, for me.
Janet Sumner:He started showing me some of the lancet imagery that he had, and I remember looking at that and thinking that's not right and and I'm not a trained forester, I haven't, I haven't gone to school for it but it didn't look like a forest, it didn't look like standing trees, it looked, you know, disturbing. And I mean that's one of the reasons I greenlighted the project and and said, well, you know, let's try to make it happen with whatever we have, because I truly wanted to know it. And, like you said, there was this sort of myth in forestry school where it's like well, we cut the trees down and they come back. And we see that in advertising all the time, we see it in every different which way. It's like well, we cut the forest but we replant it. And this was a shocking piece of information and we also wanted it to be.
Janet Sumner:I think it was very important that whatever we designed was going to be as bulletproof as we could make it. And what I mean by that is that, if people were going to criticize it, we wanted to have as many answers to why we made the choices that we made or why Trevor made the choices that we made and why the project was designed this way. So even some of the areas that we might have wanted to include, we didn't because we were afraid that the we were concerned that the information wasn't there to 100% back it up. So we made choices that would be as resilient to criticism as possible and that we tested with a number of people before we even decided on the design of the project. So it was incredibly well thought out before it even began, because we wanted to make this so sound from its design perspective. Kaya, you looked at it as well. What was your thinking of the project? You know?
Janet Sumner:10 years later kind of thing.
Kaya Adleman:My initial view of it was that it was incredibly well or it was as extensive as you said.
Kaya Adleman:It was Because I was coming right off the heels of university applying for jobs and stuff of um, of research coming out of um, nonprofits or non, in non-specific um university journals or academic journals.
Kaya Adleman:Um, just because there's the other side, where you have industry research that is often, you know, has some has an obvious like bias or um or skew to it.
Kaya Adleman:So I think I was definitely a little bit skeptical at first reading it. But then actually getting into the details and seeing, wow, this is a culmination of people who are writing this, who have backgrounds in academia, but also this is a product that could easily be published in an academic journal. So I think the detail and the um, the well, the level of detail and um, the attention to data and then the ground truthing piece the fact that someone was actually going in not just using the satellite high resolution satellite imagery but doing the ground truthing piece, which I actually got to learn about more from reading that report, made it seem a lot more trustworthy as a piece of information and then also just shocking that this was going on because I wasn't super familiar with the way that forest operations worked, because there is that assumption that's really predominant that the forest grows back after you cut it down. And to see that it's not the case and here's the clear research that we've done to back that up was very astounding to me done to back that up was very astounding to me.
Janet Sumner:We just mentioned that the study was chosen over an area that we had a lot of experience with and I would just say, right around the Wildlands Lake table, like Anna had worked on caribou planning here, I had worked on thinking through caribou planning.
Janet Sumner:Dave, you had worked on it. Maybe you can just tell us a little bit about your experience with the Northwest and maybe the history that we brought into this, because all of us I mean Trevor went out and did the field work and he did the assessments, et cetera. But it truly is a Wildlands League project in the sense that everybody contributed and kicked the tires on this and said, well, no, I think we need to go this direction, not as hard this way or whatever. And that's what makes the report so good is it has a contribution and advice from some pretty incredible people that work for Wildlands League, but also friends of Wildlands League who've either been on the board or have an association with us, maybe auditors or foresters, et cetera. So we saw a lot of expertise and advice on this. So, Dave, can you just give us a little bit of a rundown of your experience in the Northwest?
Dave Pearce:Yeah, sure. So Northwestern Ontario is, once you get, roughly parallel with Lake Nipigon. Roughly parallel with Lake Nipigon, and then further north is caribou country and has been caribou country, and it also overlaps with forest management units that are certified under the FSC Forest Stewardship Council certificate and so are certified under the FSC Forest Stewardship Council Certificate, and so we've been members of FSC for many years, and the way FSC works is that there's a set of requirements that forest companies are supposed to follow. They get audited yearly on different aspects of how they're implementing the standard of FSC, and that audit process is open to stakeholders as well as Indigenous governments in the area, indigenous communities. But as stakeholders we've weighed in on many, many audits in Northwestern Ontario.
Dave Pearce:Holders, we've weighed in on many, many audits in northwestern Ontario and so, at least from a computer point of view, knew the land quite well. We've also traveled up in that area to go as jump off points for more northerly expeditions, canoeing on the Albany and the Ottawa Piscat expeditions, canoeing on the Albany and the Ottawa Piscat. So I've driven from Thunder Bay to Pickle Lake many, many times and I've done sort of side excursions to see what the logging operations look like, and it's an area that's been using full tree harvesting for a long time. That's another reason Trevor chose it and we can talk a bit about the mechanisms of full tree harvesting and why that contributes to logging scars. But just for now we'll say that that particular amount that have taken trees off the landscape does so.
Dave Pearce:We know the land from working from FSC. We've engaged on force on provincial forest management plans, which every um every forest is required to write a new plan every 10 years. We've engaged on those all in an effort to try to keep logging out of Caribou country, cause we knew. We knew logging was bad for Caribou and we knew some of the mechanisms why that was. But logging scars just kind of cemented a little bit the long-term in our thinking, the long-term impacts of forestry, because one of the arguments is that the forest will grow back and eventually the caribou will return and we can talk a little bit about puncture the hole.
Janet Sumner:But anyway, so a lot, of, a lot of experience in that area, um, uh, by the whole team yeah, we actually worked on caribou plans with companies, uh, prior to logging scars, and we had done some designs of this, working on the various spatial models that they have that forestry companies use. And, dave, you did a what was it? The very first study. When I just arrived at Wildlands, you were just finishing off a study around harvesting and I think that you're able to sort of like you can understand what I call the black box, which is what is actually the forest management modeling tool they use. That was woodstock or sfm. What can you remind me what? What that is the uh, actual black box that they use right.
Dave Pearce:so um, at least at that time, and they've um, they've been switching over, I think gradually, to more sophisticated models, but they used a model called um, sfum, which was a strategic forest management model I believe was the acronym, and that that um, that model, was what they used to determine harvest levels on the forest and to assign a certain amount of harvest, and our hypothesis for a long time was that companies were over-harvesting, because this model didn't include things like the impacts to wildlife.
Janet Sumner:Anyway, so I'll just go back to where we were. So, suffice to say, dave doing his harvest level analysis, the SWAM model, understanding the forest and the forestry. We went into this project with a lot of information and a lot of understanding and I find that interesting that you were skeptical. I don't know where anna was positioned on this, but trevor, it was just bugging him. It was one of those things that it just annoyed him.
Kaya Adleman:He could see this pattern and he couldn't figure it out so, once you green lighted the report, do you guys know what trevor actually did? Like he like? How did he go about um assembling the project together, like what was the hypothesis, what was the methodology?
Janet Sumner:dave, do you want to talk about that? I mean, I know he started with like like wildlands league started with lancet imagery right so trevor got access to the Landsat imagery.
Janet Sumner:He was also teaching at U of T at the time and so they have a relationship with the province. He used provincial data. That was actually really an important decision point. I remember he and I talking about this and we wanted to make sure that we absolutely, because this was going to be such a shift, such a shift in the conventional thinking that forests didn't grow back 100% or even 97% or 96%, but more like 86%, and even that, I think, is a conservative estimate and I'll explain a little bit more why. But we started from this premise that whatever project was undertaken, it absolutely had to be a strong case. That was undeniable, because we didn't want to get into the oh well, it doesn't work like that, it works like this. We didn't want to have any of the data be assailable. So that's why we started with the premise of using the provincial data and Landsat imagery to look at the sites. And then there was a selection of what was it? 291 or something like that, Dave, Do you recall?
Dave Pearce:Yeah, I mean it expanded as the project went on. I can't remember how many. You looked at the first year remotely.
Janet Sumner:Yeah. So, Dave, maybe you can tell us a little bit about what was it we looked at. I mean, I've got my perception, but I want you to walk us through. When Trevor decided to do these logging scars, what was the essential process? Like how many sites? What did he put? What was in, what was out? You know how did he think through this challenge?
Dave Pearce:Yeah, so he chose um, it wasn't totally random so he chose, chose a, a patch of territory that he looked at. Uh, he was familiar enough by kind of doing the the casual uh remote sensing um scan of ontario and he said, well, there's a, there's a number of these sites in this area. So it was. It was target, rich environment, lots of these potential logging scars to check out. There was a pretty good accessibility. The area is a North Northwest of of Thunder Bay by a few hundred kilometers but several, you know all-weather highways running up and then logging roads going into the sites. So he needed accessibility.
Dave Pearce:He also was familiar with the area because we'd done a number of trips up there. One of the highways goes to Pickle Lake and that's a jump off point that we've used in a number of trips in the far north. So we've been up the highway and done, had done some scouting of of uh cutovers there and he he'd also done some old, some of his own um sort of field trips up there to get, you know, more familiar with what happens in the boreal when when uh forestry occurs. You know more familiar with what happens in the boreal when when uh forestry occurs. So we knew it both from um uh, from the 30,000 feet foot level, but also on the ground. He'd been on the ground before Um and also it um, it uh covered, I think the area that he looked at uh is covered or it's partly covered by by three or portions of three caribou ranges.
Dave Pearce:So it was in caribou range uh, and so one of the impacts of forestry uh that we've been looking at is its forestry impacts on caribou. So he wanted to cover all those off um and then he started selecting sites based on again, can I get in um, can I you know, by? You know? Is there a reasonable access, road access that will enable me to get, at least get close um and you know um? Are they representative of what I've seen out on the landscape? You know, know, doing sort of cursory, cursory work? So that's kind of the selection process.
Janet Sumner:And, and we started down that, that route. So so we got the Landsat imagery and, as you say, Trevor didn't do all the sites at once, but he had a good over 200, I think that he started.
Kaya Adleman:So the sites those were like known harvest areas that dated back 30 years.
Janet Sumner:Well, they varied right.
Kaya Adleman:Yeah, yeah, or that dated back to up to 30 years, because that was the available data that they had available.
Dave Pearce:Yeah, I think 35 was the oldest.
Janet Sumner:I was going to say, like he actually did the paper, exercise the math on on landsat imagery and, uh, drawing, that is like that's. That's what I recall.
Kaya Adleman:I recall there being over 200 sites that way so, like the landsat imagery, he would say, okay, like here's this harvest area and then over. I think he did it by. He was telling me that he did this all by hand too, which is like crazy tedious to me. But he would take the imagery and lay the area of the harvest block over it and then trace, I think by hand, to where, like, things had not grown back, and then calculated that as an area.
Dave Pearce:Yeah, I mean, eventually there was close to 300, right, close to 300 sites and it was a bit of an iterative process because he did spend two summers and so I think I think he started. He started looking at the sites remotely and trying to do a bit of an assessment and digitizing the area that he felt was covered by roads and landings and turnarounds, what can be called logging scars, um, and digitizing them.
Kaya Adleman:And then, uh, so we did a number of those and then he would go visit those sites physically, in person, with drone footage or drone imagery and take those like super high resolution to just verify the data yeah, so he did.
Dave Pearce:He did that on on about 10 of the sites, like eventually it was 10, so he was. He was able to visit 27 sites, I think, in total, uh, but they had the remote imagery for 300. So, yeah, and he took a drone with them so it wasn't just on the ground, so he also got the intermediate sort of imagery. It wasn't remote sensing, it was kind of you know, a few hundred feet up, uh, with a drone, and then he could um alter his uh hand, um uh calculations or the calculations that came from digitizing by hand hand calculations or the calculations that came from digitizing by hand the areas.
Dave Pearce:You can alter that based on the information he got from the site. In some cases it contracted it, in other cases it's like no, actually these boundaries are too small.
Janet Sumner:He was looking at it with drone imagery as well, like because it wasn't, some of it wasn't passable, it was, you know, piles of logs that you couldn't wade through. So we'd use the drones to get out there. And some of it was because the lancet imagery didn't have the full extent of the road, like maybe it had been drawn and it wasn't. Um, yeah, it wasn't as long as a there were a number of these that I remember him, you know, because he would come in later in the day and he and I would sit and pour over these images and we would look at them and he'd say, see, boss, this is where the image doesn't go all the way out here and it they've cut it off here and it actually comes around this way. So we did a lot of um looking at the images. And then it became so revelatory when doing the field work because the Landsat imagery looked at.
Janet Sumner:You know that stuff gets inputted, it gets corrected, and I was discussing this with somebody else just the other day that those corrections are often done by interns who are working for the ministry and they're kind of. You know they have different variations of of um, shall we say, precision as to how they get entered, and so when he started to do the groundwork, it was really, I think, a little bit um of a revelation on just how much you know, the variation there was, and so he really wanted to get out there and do it it was tough and also wanted to get a representative sample that he was looking at the ground truthing. Yeah, it was very interesting.
Kaya Adleman:Yeah, Maybe we could define what ground truthing is for the record. Yeah, Maybe we could define what ground truthing is for for the record. That's it's going. It's when, if you do a digital exercise like determining the like, looking at a logging scar you know what's the word. If you're looking, if you're doing that, if you're trying to identify logging scars digitally, ground truthing is actually going out into the field and making sure that what you're looking at is correct yeah, yeah.
Janet Sumner:so, dave, maybe you could explain a little bit about that, because because ground truthing is it sounds like it's something, but it's basically getting out on that roadway and how it was like I would characterize it as planes, trains and automobiles Almost like what was he doing out there, like you and I both know this like he looked. He looked like we've been through the worst when he came back from those trips to ground. Truth, yeah.
Dave Pearce:Yeah, so he flew to Thunder Bay with his gear and his partner, victoria, and then rented a pickup truck, four-wheel drive vehicle, and then he located, geo-located these remotely, and so he had the coordinates, the GPS coordinates and maps and everything, so he knew how to get there. But some of the logging roads, again, have been been shut down or hadn't been used by, at least by big, big trucks, uh, maybe ATVs and stuff, uh, but they haven't been used, byverts and going through, um, not trees on the roadways but brush and long grass. And and then the first year they hiked. So they would hike, they'd get as far as they could with the truck, and then we're like, okay, we can't go any further. We got the truck stuck and there's, you know, we're a hundred kilometers off the highway, you know, uh, so we're not going to risk too much, so we're going to hike in. So then they would hike tens of kilometers. Right, I think the furthest one, he maybe, you know, hike 20 kilometers in a day to get into his site. And he had a drone. So he had a drone in his backpack, um, that he would send up and fly.
Dave Pearce:So they, they did measurements on the ground. Uh, he, he and and uh, victoria, with tape. So they had, you know, they had been, you know, um field measuring tapes out. And then, uh, so they're on the ground and recording what type of vegetation was there, whether there are any trees, whether it was grass, whether it's shrubs, raspberries, fireweed, whatever, um, and then taking, taking photographs and then getting aerial images with the drone. So that was, that was ground truthing. And the second year they got a little bit smarter, uh, and took mountain bikes with them so they could cover more ground. Once they they had to leave the truck and they camped out in the bush Like they didn't go back to a motel. Uh, at night they just camped in the bush Like they didn't go back to a motel. At night they just camped in the bush and in the. You know, I think it was August. So the bugs were pretty bad, the heat was pretty bad sometimes, but they actually had a good time, yeah, and they got some great images.
Janet Sumner:I mean, there's a fantastic image on that website of Victoria standing next to a debris pile and it is clearly almost twice her height, right, like 10 feet high. It's really not that she's five foot, but you know it's probably 10 feet or higher images and it's yeah, it's just really worthwhile if people want to go. Take a look at this and you can really see firsthand what does it look like when you get out into a logging road or a road where they've been hauling trees from, and what does that look like 10, 20, 30 years on and what's the reality of it. Not just what do the models tell you or what does models tell you or what does government tell you, but actually somebody who went out and traversed so many kilometers of logging roads. So we have basically on the site you have this big repository of looking at almost 300 sites.
Janet Sumner:You've got the evidence of uh using the satellite imagery, you can see the scars into the forest. You you definitely see um regeneration and robust regeneration on the majority of the site, but there are these logging scars that exist on there and he tried to, he wanted to examine, we all did. We wanted to know what was that as a percentage like what didn't come back after 30, 35 years. And then what he.
Janet Sumner:The other stage that he did was he he looked at the ground, truthing to make sure, like, okay, we can do a, a, um, a desktop exercise where we look at what is the calculation of that logging scar, but let's get out there and actually make sure that we're accurate, using a representative sample and figuring out what those logging scars really look like from the ground. And so he did that. That was his two-year study that he took care of, and and we have a great body of work on that logging scars report. And and also he he recorded his methodology of how he did all of that. So you can you can actually see that. And that's quite impressive too, because trevor is, if nothing else, very, very detailed very detailed.
Dave Pearce:Um, the other thing he measured not only the logging scars, the the extent of the clear cut, because because that was also something that you can kind of estimate from remote imagery, and he was digitizing that, but he needed that as the denominator. So what percentage of the clear cut was covered by the logging scars? So he wanted to get a good sense of where exactly that edge of the clear cut was. So he'd have that to compare the size of the logging scar to the size of the clear cut or the harvest block in forestry terms. So we actually did that with the drone because the clear cuts are massive.
Kaya Adleman:So you might have included, clued in that Earth Day is upon us by the influx of green messaging likely flooding your social media feeds, and some of this messaging may be mentioning Canada's forests, which has, as we know, become an increasingly popular flashpoint in the greater environmental discourse. The language surrounding Canadian forests can be confusing, though, like what does sustainable mean in the context of our forests? What is the difference between deforestation and forest degradation? That's why, on the Clear Cut, we're committed to weeding through the words and connecting with experts to unpack the issues facing Canada's forests.
Kaya Adleman:As listeners, you've become instrumental in bringing us these important conversations, like what does a transition of the fiber economy look like, and should we really be considering biomass fuels a climate solution? There's a lot more beyond the tree line, with warnings that an even worse wildfire season is coming this summer and Canada's slow progress towards meeting its 2050 climate and nature goals. Your support keeps us bringing these critical issues to life. You can show your love for the podcast by giving us a donation, linked in the episode description below, leaving us a review or sharing the podcast with your friends. From all of us at Wildlands League, thank you.
Dave Pearce:Well, what Logging Scars found was that over the last and I'll probably get my, the stats won't be exactly right, because I'm just doing this off the top of my head Over the last 35 years plus, since we've been doing full tree harvesting in Ontario, the impacts have been profound, and so Trevor in our office, found that 14% of each cut block an average of 14% after 30, 35 years was not coming back in a forested condition, and the resulting cumulative footprint over that time is over 650,000 hectares of forest in Ontario that hasn't come back. That's an area larger than Quatico Mitchell Park, 10 times the size of the city of Toronto. It's huge, and it has implications for carbon and endangered wildlife like caribou.
Kaya Adleman:What does that mean? A forested condition?
Dave Pearce:So what Trevor found was that these footprints on the forest which are visible from aircraft they're actually visible from satellite basically have no trees growing on them. They have fireweed, they've got raspberries, they've got grasses and rushes, some cases, a bit of alder, but they should be mostly in conifer or virgin poplar.
Janet Sumner:Should be trees.
Kaya Adleman:Forest, you might say.
Dave Pearce:You might say forest, yeah, um, and what instead was there? And in in some cases, yeah, there's some vegetation, grass, as I said, berries, uh, other vegetation, but a lot of cases it's just slash, which is the waste product of trees piled up, sometimes meters deep maybe we could um dive into what creates the logging scars.
Kaya Adleman:What is the what, what is the? Um mechanism that creates, creates those uh features on the landscape?
Dave Pearce:I can take a stab, um. So what you see is is, we'd kind of described it as a line with rectangular, you know, roughly rectangular patches parallel, or, you know, in a line parallel with the line, the line is the road. So one of the main features of logics card is the road that's used to access the cut block for the heavy equipment that's used for cutting and processing and also for the trucks that log, that haul the logs out. So they need a fairly substantial road, even the, you know the the lowest grade roads are, you know, big enough for a transport truck basically to go in and be able to turn around Um, uh. So that's the linear feature. And then the, the kind of the patches along the road are created, um, by uh landings where they haul the woody material out of the bush and pilot and process it to be put on the truck.
Dave Pearce:And the main, uh, at least at the time of this study and and for the 20 years prior, the main mechanism for getting trees out of the bush was called, or it's called, full tree harvesting, where the tree is cut at the stump by a feather buncher, uh, a big machine, um, with a blade on the bottom and it. It will cut five, six, seven trees and hold them all together and then take them and put them down, boom like a, like a bunch of matches, and it's the whole tree above the stump. Um, so the branches, the, the tops and everything, and then a grapple skitter will come and then take again five, six, eight, 10 trees at a hall, grab, grab all that have been laid down by the buncher and haul them out to the roadside on a skid trail and then they are processed there by a de-limber which, as the name suggests it, takes the limbs off. And these are mostly, you know, boreal conifer trees, so jack pine, black spruce, with a bit of deciduous or hardwoods thrown in. So if anybody's familiar with the boreal forest, the trees are fairly skinny, fairly straight, and they don't have big limbs, not like an oak or a maple tree. The limbs are fairly small, so they anyways de-limb them, cut off the tops that are unmerchable if they're too small to go through a sawmill. Or at the butt of the tree if there's any rot, they would cut that off, and then so they'd stack the merchantable wood and sometimes that wood stays there for months on the site before you have enough of it or you have room at the mill, um for it to be hauled away.
Dave Pearce:And we've driven in logging roads that had wood stock at the, at the roadside that went for kilometers it was it's. You just drive and drive and drive and there's just wood 10 feet high stacked all along there. So that's the commercial wood, and then that some of most of that gets hauled away. But sometimes there's quite a bit of commercial wood that gets left too because, for whatever reason, the market at the time or whatever, it's not merchantable. So it's just left at the roadside along with all the tops and branches and whatnot and, um, and all the the soil underneath has been run over by heavy machinery that's processed all this wood and then the wood itself is stacked on it.
Dave Pearce:So you have a few things that are creating these areas that don't regenerate, because the ground underneath is packed like concrete and then it's smothered with all kinds of wood debris over top. So trees just can't grow there. It's just it's almost like a parking lot when they're done, um, in terms of the, the ability of a tree to actually grow on those those areas. So those are the mechanisms and they have a couple other things that, uh, you have ditching on either either side of the road to direct the runoff, so the road doesn't get flooded out. So those are often, often get plugged and filled with water, Um, so they're not growing back either.
Dave Pearce:Um, if they're, if they dry out, sometimes you will get regeneration in the ditches. So you get kind of a weird. You've got the the road logging scar and then if you have a few trees on either side of the road and then on either one side or both sides, uh, of the road, you've got these compacted areas, um, and they're quite gray because it's wood that's, and the wood waste is is the thing you see mostly, and it's uh bleached by the sun and it's uh kind of a uh, you know, a gray uh like the side of an unpainted barn. So you can actually see that from the air quite vividly.
Janet Sumner:Yeah, if you scroll in on some of those images or zoom in on them, you can actually see the wood just piled on the side of the road and Dave's right it's sort of that very gray of an unpainted barn. The side of the road and dave's right it's sort of that very gray of an unpainted barn. Um it. You do sometimes see that those areas kind of look green, like they can do, but when, again, when you zoom in, what I found interesting is they're like berry bushes. You know there's some berry bushes peeking up through there, but uh, and this is, you know, 20, 30 years later you've got berry bushes. So the bears are in love with it, but the uh. I think trevor had an almost bear incident when he was out camping, as well, yeah, at least one, yeah, yeah, you're right.
Dave Pearce:So raspberries, um fireweed, um alder, um those early successional you know. Basically, grasses and berries are, you know, if there is vegetation, that's what's growing there, not trees.
Janet Sumner:Yeah, so that's what ground truthing gets you and it lets you see that reality and those are the ways that logging scars are created, or have been created over the last little while. So that's dependent on full tree harvesting, the kind of machinery that's used.
Kaya Adleman:Yeah, All right, janet, I'm glad that we had the chance to talk to Dave about you know the background of the report. I think you guys have some very cool and interesting stories about the genesis of Wildlands League's Logging Scars report. So I really enjoyed having this conversation, being able to kind of sit with you guys as you reminisced and learned a lot about the report and its methods. You know, I think logging scars was kind of my first introduction to Wildlands League, which I think just speaks to the strength and the robustness of the work that Trevor did and that everyone on the team did, and so, yeah, I really appreciate it.
Kaya Adleman:I think it's important that we ask the question what happens in the forest after full tree harvesting goes through? And we've talked about on the podcast in the past the need to do more monitoring of these landscapes after they're industrialized so that we can truly get a better understanding of those impacts, and I think this work is an important piece into helping build the puzzle of what that is. So I'm looking forward to the next part of this conversation, because we talked about the report and we talked about its findings, but in the next iteration we're going to get into what this all means in the greater context of Canada's forest, which is also an important discussion. So I'm excited for next week's episode as well.
Janet Sumner:Yeah, and for me, one of the things about this report and I remember this very distinctly is being with Trevor in the office watching the images come up and as Dave and I talk about, we started out being skeptics. But as Trevor brought all these images up and as we referenced in the discussion, I was often in the office late in the day and with him and he was looking at images and we had all these decision points that we were making Okay, let's not include this area because it looks like it has partial regrowth. And, based on my recollections of all these things, this is definitely an underestimate. And if Canada was to truly go out or figure out where do we have successful regeneration, I think we would have a very different picture of what's happening out in our forests. And I'm not suggesting that we don't have successful regeneration because we do, and there are places in Canada where it works really marvelously well.
Janet Sumner:But there are many places and many forests where the assumption goes to oh, we've replant the trees, we put as many trees in the ground as we take out. Therefore they all come back. But even that that's regrowing trees. It's not necessarily regrowing a forest and that is an important distinction because it's a thriving, robust ecosystem with a lot of interactions. We talk about this actually in our last couple of episodes with Michelle Connelly from Conservation North and she talks about the complexity of the forest. So even if you can say you replanted as many trees as you cut, or even more, whether or not you've actually successfully regrown that forest and whether or not you know whether you've done that is a big, important piece. And we don't have, we aren't testing that, certainly not in ontario and many other regions across the country. We have a free to grow standard and you know, and that's done at maybe 10 or 15 years and we don't look beyond that. And yeah, it's, it's, it's a challenging problem.
Janet Sumner:So what we're going to hear in the next episode, which is really interesting, is the implications of this. What does it mean? What does it mean in terms of carbon, what does it mean in terms of endangered species? What does it mean in terms of even fiber supply for companies that are going to come back and do a second pass or a second harvest? So I think all of this is our implications and these 290 or almost 300 sites. You can still go to the maps that we have and you can see these areas of using Google Maps. You can see that they're largely barren still, and you can see these areas of using Google Maps. You can see that they're largely barren still.
Kaya Adleman:Or if you want to check out more about the logging scars work, you can go to logingscarsca. The report has its own website. You can see all of those higher resolution images there.
Janet Sumner:Yeah, go check it out and stay tuned for the next episode. Thanks, Faya. Thank you, if you like listening to the Clear Cut and want to keep the content coming, support the show. It would mean a lot to Kaya and I. The link to do so will be in the episode description below.
Kaya Adleman:You can also become a supporter by going to our website at wwwwildlandsleagueorg. Slash the clear cut and also make sure to leave us a review on your favorite podcast streaming platform. It would really help the podcast and stay tuned for new episodes by following us on social media.
Janet Sumner:That's at Wildlands League on Instagram, twitter and Facebook or LinkedIn, of course.
Kaya Adleman:See you next time.
Janet Sumner:I just realized when you were talking there that I've had more Earth Days than you've been alive. Really, I've done 34 Earth Days, right.
Kaya Adleman:That's so true. Well, it started in the 70s. Right Earth Day became a thing.
Janet Sumner:Oh yeah, so that would have been. Oh, I know, but I've personally done 34 okay but yeah, that's, that's quite because I did that's 1990 and then now it's 24, so that's 24 plus 10. That's right. My math's right on that right. That's 34. You are not 34 years old.
Kaya Adleman:No, no, I'm not 34 years old. Wow, that's crazy.