Maintaining forest biodiversity - collaborating with industry to understand how the intensification of forest management will impact biodiversity

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Canadians are responsible for nearly10% of the world's forest. Approximately¼ of Canada's forests are currentlymanaged for timber production. Increasing demand for this natural resource requires Canada to grow more wood fibre on less land, which has stimulated several provinces to consider implementing intensification of silviculture. Canadians are now faced with the keyuncertaintythat we do not understand how the intensification of forest management practices will affect forest biodiversity. This project represents a long-standing collaboration among Forest Industry, government and universities using adaptive management asa formal process to deal with uncertainties in implementing policies and management practices that maintain forest biodiversity. Industryand NSERC that have laid the foundation for the long term experimental NEBIE Plot Network and the Intensive Forest Management Science Partnership. The primarygoal of this proposed research is to quantifythe effects of intensification of silviculture on the compositional, structural, and functional diversityof plant communities within the boreal and GLSLforests of Ontario. This will be accomplished using data from the NEBIE plot network to assess above ground plant species diversityand below ground seed bank diversityusing DNA barcoding protocols for barcoding seeds and estimating seed bank diversityin northern forest ecosystems. We will build a functional trait matrix for all species in our project, which will be used in analyzing patterns in forest communityassemblage following disturbance of varying intensity. A secondarygoal of this project is to advance the adaptive management cycle by(1) Monitoring biodiversityresponses using the NEBIE sampling designs that will provide reliable information and will enable tests of alternative hypotheses about effects of intensification of silviculture on the compositional, structural, and functional diversityof plant communities within the boreal and Great Lakes -St. Lawrence (GLSL) forests of Ontario, (2) Evaluate the effects of policyoptions by analyzing and evaluating data, and (3) Revise goals and objectives using the resulting information.