In celebration of National Forest Week, we had the opportunity to sit down with Stephanie Ewen (RPF), Manager of the Alex Fraser Research Forest, to explore the unique challenges and rewards of managing one of UBC Forestry’s key research forests. With a deep commitment to sustainable forest management and a passion for fostering educational opportunities, Stephanie shares her insights on balancing conservation, education, and operational forestry within this dynamic landscape.
Can you introduce yourself and describe your role at Alex Fraser Research Forest?
Stephanie Ewen, Manager, Alex Fraser Research Forest. I would say that my primary role is being professionally responsible for managing UBC’s area-base crown tenure for timber management that is the Alex Fraser Research Forest. We manage the tenure primarily to protect research and provide demonstration and education opportunities, while using timber revenue to cover our staff and infrastructure costs. No two days are the same, but there are seasonal routines such as spring planting, summer forest development and road building, and winter harvesting that set the cadence of my role. Interspersed with those activities, I get the pleasure of working with researchers to help facilitate their projects, and provide teaching support to UBC Forestry’s various field-courses.
What are the main challenges you face in managing the Alex Fraser Research Forest?
I was recruited as the manager of the Alex Fraser Research Forest following the 2017 fires that affected over 10% of the Research Forest landbase. I had worked here prior to the fires as a Planning Forester, so was familiar with the systems in place and the overall objectives of the Research Forest, but was also challenged with post-fire recovery from every aspect.
Initially, that was very straightforward work centered on salvaging as much timber value as possible from the burned areas, and rehabilitating the over 50 km of fire guards that were build to fight the fires and ensure they weren’t going to be a source of future losses. We were so fortunate that a lot of the time we worked on salvage coincided with COVID, so log markets were good, and we had fewer research and education projects with fewer people traveling to the area.
It allowed us to be singularly focused to achieve the work. As we salvaged, we also took on reforestation of the burned areas, and as of 2023, finally declared all of the burned and salvaged areas, including some fire guards as being successfully regenerated. In the wake of all of that salvage, we are left with a much more extensive road network, and much greater area in young stands that will need investments to be properly stewarded into the future while we simultaneously have less mature timber available to help fund those investments. My current challenge for the Alex Fraser Research Forest is to develop new revenue streams to support the work we do, and to find ways to make partial harvesting methods more profitable as we wait for some landscape recovery.
How do you balance the conservation goals with the operational needs of the forest?
I don’t see those two ideas as being in opposition to each other, and therefore have never felt it was a balancing act. We need to harvest and sell timber to support our staff, infrastructure, and landbase investments. However, we also need to reduce stand densities in many areas to improve stand productivity, resilience and diversity. The more time I work in the woods, the more I believe that timber harvesting is the best tool we have available to accelerate and help support our non-timber landbase objectives, such as recruiting big trees.
We are so used to thinking of timber harvesting in BC as massive progressive clearcuts like what we saw in the 1980s, or the vast areas of salvage from Mountain Pine Beetle that will be a legacy in the BC Interior for many more decades to come. That isn’t what all timber harvesting is, and I love designing and implementing silvicultural systems that help to improve or maintain other landbase values. I’ve inherited a harvest prioritization approach for the research forest where we prioritize harvesting 1) expanding losses, 2) dead timber, 3) maintenance of research and demonstration sites, 4) timber at risk or of declining vigour, and finally 5) healthy timber. I have yet to see us dip into healthy timber to achieve a purely operational objective, and are frequently overwhelmed with priorities 1 and 2.
Could you share a recent research project happening within your forest that excites you?
Currently, I have my own pet project on commercial thinning that I am really excited about. So, it’s not really formal research yet, although I keep trying to recruit researchers to join me in this pet project. We’ve done a lot of commercial thinning in mature stands at the research forest as preparatory cuts for other partial cutting silviculture systems, but I have started exploring commercial thinning in some of our mixed-species mid-rotation stands that were established in the mid-1980s.
There is a lot of knowledge to be gained from research done in the past on commercial thinning of single-species stands, however, we have moved towards a lot of mixed-species planting in BC, and there is not a lot of information about how to manage those stands in the future. Commercial thinning in single-species stands would traditionally result in harvesting of the smallest trees in a stand, but in some of these mixed stands, that would mean preferentially removing one species over another, reducing the species diversity and negating the intention of the person that had planted a mixture to start with. So, I’m excited to start looking at this more closely, and understand better how we can interact with these stands.
How do forests like the Alex Fraser Research Forest play a critical role in addressing climate change and protecting biodiversity?
I don’t believe that in our small little area, we are going to make meaningful change for either global climate change or biodiversity loss through our management practices. However, at a conference I attended this spring, Dr. Kira Hoffman spoke about “boundary spanners” being catalysts for meaningful change. Working at the research forest, particularly on a crown tenure, I do see that as the role we fill. In order to conduct our business, we work with people in academia, government and industry and are constantly sharing ideas or bringing theory into practice.
When the Alex Fraser Research Forest was first envisioned, it was the local community looking for ways to try new things and learn how to better manage the forests of the region. They were looking for the “boundary spanners” that Kira talked about. After working in many areas of the province, I do think we have been successfully fulfilling that vision in the Cariboo Region, and see forest practices first tried and tested at the research forest making their way into use for other tenure holders in the region.
In your view, how can the public get more involved in supporting sustainable forestry and conservation efforts?
Choose to learn and deepen your understanding of forestry and conservation. Today, everything is so polarized and topics are reduced to a headline instead of a full debate, and those opinions are so emotionally driven. I don’t think any decision I’ve had to make in managing a forest can be reduced to a headline as there are always so many values to consider.
On the conservation side for example, so often I see that people want to preserve ecosystems so that they never change, often by excluding people, but that is unrealistic and not reflective of how the forests of BC have ever been. It’s sometimes just hard to understand the disturbances and changes that have occurred over several human lifetimes that are necessary to achieve the conditions we see today. We’ve done considerable damage in some parts of BC by trying to exclude people and disturbances such as fire from our forests.
Can you tell us about some of the field schools and youth programs offered at the research forest, and how they inspire the next generation of foresters?
Every year for a week before the Labour Day weekend, we load up buses at UBC and bring a group of undergraduate forestry students to the Alex Fraser Research Forest for field school. These students are about to start their third year of study and stay in a remote camp away from the influence of WiFi and cell phones to be fully immersed in learning about the ecology of the forests here in the interior of BC.
We get to whet their appetite for learning about alternative silvicultural systems, and show them how we can use harvesting to support our management objectives. In many cases, this is the most north those students have ever been and the first time being in a forestry-dependant community. It’s great to show them just how vast and diverse BC’s forests are, the importance they hold in the region, and introduce them to people from throughout the sector who are working together to improve forest practices.
We also host a forest education business, Wild & Immersive, that is currently providing learning opportunities in the forest for youth aged 3-12. We have Wild and Immersive kids on our site 12 months of the year, who are gaining observational skills, learning to be comfortable in natural environments, and beginning to understand the complexities of our natural environment. Those foundational developmental skills are critical to becoming a thoughtful, creative Forester of the future.
In your view, how can the public get more involved in supporting sustainable forestry and conservation efforts during National Forests Week and year-round?
Stop planting trees! But seriously, Dr. Paul Hessburg has been talking for years now about our current “epidemic of trees,” so maybe spend some time this week better understanding why before deciding whether or not to plant that tree. Another great thing to do would be to get to know the trees around you better – start documenting how they are doing and why – foster those observational skills and the idea that change takes a long time for trees and forests.
