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The Forest Enhancement Society of BC (FESBC) has approved the final funding required to complete fuel management treatments in the Ellison area of Vernon. A report to Vernon city council at their regular meeting Monday, states the $125,000 investment will support treatment of two units, bringing the total area treated on Crown land to 72 hectares. “Fuel reduction work on this project began in 2023, and these final units will be completed by Nakimu Ventures Inc. no later than March 31, 2027,” the report says. “The city applied to FESBC to support fuel management on these Crown lands as part of our efforts to reduce wildfire risk in one of the higher risk wildland–urban interface areas identified in the Community Wildfire Resiliency Plan.” The project counterparts and strengthens other recent initiatives in the area, including BC Timber Sales 2021 clearcuts and BC Parks hand treatments completed in 2022.

FRASER CANYON — The Nature-Based Solutions Foundation in Vancouver says it has recently acquired two clusters of private land inholdings totaling just over 55 hectares within the traditional territory of the Kanaka Bar Band in the Fraser Canyon for conservation purposes. According to a news release from the conservation organization, the 55 hectares of land are inside the boundaries of Kanaka Bar’s proposed Indigenous Protected & Conserved Area (IPCA). The foundation says the acquisitions will safeguard exceptionally diverse old-growth forests, including habitat that features Canada’s largest documented Rocky Mountain juniper, and they build on NBSF’s earlier purchase of the “Old Man Jack’s” parcel in 2022, thereby bringing the total to three private properties to be returned to Kanaka Bar through Indigenous-led conservation, title-registered legal protection, and long-term stewardship funding.

By the time a so-called “raw log” is loaded onto a truck — or in a small minority of cases, onto a ship — it has already travelled through a dense web of economic activity that is anything but raw. It has been identified and cruised through professional forest planning. Roads have been engineered and constructed. Heavy equipment has been purchased, financed and maintained. Logging crews have mobilized. Mechanics and welders have serviced machinery. Truck drivers have hauled. Fuel suppliers have delivered. Silviculture obligations have been funded or secured. Stumpage has been paid to the Crown on public lands. In many instances, Indigenous partnerships and benefit agreements structure access and revenue sharing. Every log carries embedded value long before it ever approaches a mill gate or tidewater. Industry analyst David Elstone has noted that it can take more than 100 distinct job functions to sustainably plan, harvest and deliver timber from forest to primary manufacturing. 

Representatives from the province’s community forest groups will gather in Vernon this summer to find solutions to challenges the sector faces. The B.C. Community Forestry Association will hold its 24th Annual General Meeting in Vernon June 3 to 5. Community forests are licensed provincial lands that are managed through partnerships, usually between municipalities, First Nations, and other stakeholders. They are intended to be managed in a way that prioritizes the needs of the community, such as local stewardship, sustainable forest management, and economic benefits. The association (BCCFA) is a grassroots, membership-based non-profit that acts as advocates for the community forest industry. “Every year we hold a conference and annual general meeting in or near one of our member communities,” Jennifer Gunter, Executive Director of the BCCFA, told Vernon Matters. “This year we will be hosted by the Monashee Community Forest, which is a partnership between the Splatsin First Nation and the Village of Lumby.”

A community science initiative is uncovering previously unrecorded fungi across Greater Victoria, highlighting the region’s rich and still largely unknown biodiversity. Some discoveries may even represent species new to science. The project, MycoMap BC, invites the public to photograph, collect and submit mushroom and slime mould samples for DNA sequencing. Since launching last fall, nearly 14,000 collections have been submitted across British Columbia, including about 2,500 from Greater Victoria. “We’re building baseline data on fungal biodiversity that simply doesn’t exist yet,” said Elora Adamson, project coordinator at the University of Victoria biodiversity lab. As of mid-February, roughly 350 DNA sequencing results have been processed. Adamson said 11 collections represent species recorded for the first time in British Columbia. … Of those results, six newly recorded fungi were found in Greater Victoria, four in Sooke and two in Victoria.

Forest loss does more than reduce tree cover. A new global study involving UBC Okanagan researchers shows it can fundamentally change how watersheds hold and release water. The research analyzed data from 657 watersheds across six continents. It found that both forest loss and changes in forest landscape pattern cause watersheds to release a higher proportion of “young water”—rain and snowmelt that moves through a watershed within roughly two to three months of falling. “Young water is a signal that water is moving quickly through a system,” says Ming Qiu, lead author and doctoral student in UBC Okanagan’s Earth and Environmental Sciences program. “When the young-water fraction is high, it means less water is being stored in soils and groundwater for use during drier periods.” The study was co-authored by Qiu and Dr. Adam Wei, professor in UBCO’s Irving K. Barber Faculty of Science.