Undergraduate Research Assistant at UBC (Forest and Conservation Science) in Vancouver, BC
This summer, I have had the opportunity to work as a research assistant for the Forest Insect Disturbance Ecology Lab at UBC. I have been assisting the grad students with their research primarily on the alder bark beetle, its fungal symbiont, and its effects on red alder stands in the Lower Mainland and Southern Vancouver Island. The field work I have been doing involves insect trap collections, external R-surveys, and finding newly attacked trees. I also have been gaining lab experience by doing DNA extractions and sample prep for qPCR assays for the fungus associated with the alder bark beetle.
Local Conference of Youth Canada (LCOY) 2022 – an event UBC Forestry is co-hosting with Human and Nature Youth Club and LCOY Canada – is expected to attract hundreds of attendees from across Canada and beyond.
About LCOY Canada 2022
Happening Oct. 22, 2022, online, LCOY Canada 2022 is a first-of-its-kind, free conference that is aimed at climate-action-motivated youth and their community supporters and mentors.
“It’s also happening shortly before the next COP27 conference so that we can ensure the discussions and recommended action items coming out of the conference are delivered to COP27 decision makers in a timely manner,” says UBC Forestry’s Dr. Anil Shrestha, an organizing committee member.
Key youth climate activists and influencers will be leading several workshops and seminars on themes that include climate justice, extreme weather and climate change, biodiversity and climate change impacts and building sustainable communities through local action.
Among the keynote speakers is UBC Forestry’s Dr. Stephen Sheppard who will present Green Design Strategies for Healthy, Climate-Resilient Cities.
Dr. Stephen Sheppard is a professor emeritus and director of the Collaborative for Advanced Landscape Planning (CALP). His research focuses on climate change planning, outreach, and community engagement. Published in more than 150 peer-reviewed publications, Dr. Sheppard is also the author of the book Visualizing Climate Change. He led UBC’s Research Cluster of Excellence on Cool Tools: Social Mobilization on Climate Change using Digital Tools and spearheaded many community-based climate solutions programs such as The Cool ‘Hoods Champs program. He continues to be in demand for speaking engagements and national media interviews.
Juliet Lu is an Assistant Professor with both the Faculty of Forestry and UBC’s School for Public Policy and Global Affairs. She is a political ecologist focused on the implications of China’s growing investments in land and other resources in Southeast Asia and beyond.
Tell us about yourself!
I’m a political ecologist and a global China scholar, and most of what I study centers on struggles over land and their larger social, environmental, and territorial implications. I’m an Assistant Professor in Forest Resources Management and in the School of Public Policy, and I was hired by the Interdisciplinary Biodiversity Solutions (IBioS) cluster for their qualitative social science position to focus on environmental governance and business.
Outside of work, I play ultimate frisbee and love cooking and complaining while losing to friends at Settlers of Catan. I also co-host a podcast called the Belt and Road Pod, which covers what I refer to as ‘grounded’ research on China’s growing engagements in the developing world.
Can you give us an overview of your research? What drew you to this work?
The core research questions I ask center on the political economy of the expansion of rubber plantations–what drives rubber expansion, who decides where and how it’s grown, who reaps the benefits (in terms of profit and power), etc. With time, my focus has shifted from the plantations themselves to the actors involved and power relations further down the supply chain. However, the greater questions I often run into relate to the world’s fixation on monoculture production, how we determine crop feasibility for sustainable growth, and whether China’s rise is causing shifts in dominant global structures (particularly with regard to development and environmental governance).
I became interested in these questions during the five years (2009-2013) I worked and lived in the Mekong Region before grad school. After college, I moved to Yunnan Province in Southwest China and worked as a translator and junior researcher for the World Agroforestry Centre. Here, I became fascinated with the transnational dynamics of environmental governance (e.g. how China’s logging ban was affecting Myanmar’s and Lao’s forests) and the push to expand tree crops (walnuts, tea, and rubber especially). I wanted to see how those dynamics looked on the other side of the border.
In 2012, I moved to Laos to work with the Centre for Development and Environment on an inventory of land investments. The work I did with them introduced many questions I couldn’t answer within the given project timelines and so I went back to school, setting me on the path towards landing here at UBC.
With the pressing urgency of the climate crisis, how does your research shed light on another approach/perspective to understanding our environmental issues?
Rubber has been identified as a primary driver of deforestation (and related carbon emissions from land change) in the Mekong Region, and indeed, much of the region’s lost forest has been replaced by rubber. I look at the rubber boom in comparison to other crop booms that have also driven mass deforestation, and I work with several groups asking how to prevent future forest loss from agricultural expansion. My research (and that of many others) shows that the drivers of crop booms – from policies that promote cash crops, to market signals, to struggles to claim territory and property – play out way above the heads of the individual land users cutting down the forest and planting rubber. This helps us understand why mitigation interventions that target specific locations often create leakage of emissions (i.e. farmers or land investors moving away from a protected location instead of deforesting it) instead of reducing them overall. As such, I think a focus on greater systemic factors – often referred to as indirect drivers, although I think they’re pretty direct! – that drive crop booms and deforestation is needed.
Can you share with us some of the most interesting things you’ve learned from your research on China’s growing demand for raw materials on land and natural resource management in Southeast Asia?
What tends to surprise folks (and surprised me) most is that Chinese actors have had far less success in acquiring land and extracting resources than most people assume. There was a lot of excitement (and fear) surrounding China’s rising interest in land in the 2000s, and with the announcement of the Belt and Road Initiative in 2013, China’s infrastructure investments also became a major focus. But China is very new to investing overseas and has faced a number of steep learning curves. Early narratives around China’s investment boom also ignored how important host country politics are. They overlooked the sensitivity of local communities and governments to land as the basis of their livelihoods, sovereignty, and identity. This is not a new story, nor a Chinese story – the tendency to view land and resources as commodities that are easy to disaggregate, buy, and exchange is widespread, and the tendency to forget their social and political entanglements is not uniquely Chinese.
What are you looking forward to most here at UBC?
I’m very grateful to find myself in such an interdisciplinary intellectual community as we have here at UBC, especially to be in departments that encourage applied work and collaborations beyond academia. Some of my new research I think really lends itself to working with folks outside my methodological wheelhouse – engaging colleagues who do land change science, who look at global economic trade policies and institutions, even those who might want to look more closely at rubber wood supply chains, for example. I’m also really excited to start teaching the fundamentals of political ecology in my graduate course (Resource Governance and the Corporation, FRST 578C 203) this spring, and in the longer term to connect students with the civil society organizations I work with in hopes of developing further research projects and advocacy outputs for my partners. Perhaps most importantly, I’m looking forward to getting out more and exploring BC’s incredible forests and the awesome food scene here in Vancouver!
Prof. Avramidis, Head of the Department of Wood Science, is acknowledged for his extensive work in the fields of wood physics and wood drying. A leading researcher in radio frequency vacuum drying and, in his field, Prof. Avramidis’ research has advanced wood sciences through the study of wood-water relationships, water sorption and diffusion, processes for non-destructive timber evaluation, and various wood drying methods. On top of his role as professor, Prof. Avramidis has authored close to 300 publications, held the role of reviewer for numerous scientific journals, publishers, research foundations, faculty, and departments, and is the elected President of the International Academy of Wood Science (IAWS) effective June 2023.
Linnaeus Academy Research Foundation will be presenting the award to Prof. Avramidis in an Oct. 20, 2022 award ceremony in Växjö, Sweden. Research groups at Linnaeus University are looking forward to long-term collaboration and advancements in the forestry and wood science fields alongside Prof. Avramidis.
About the Award
The Carola and Carl-Olof Ternryd Award is delegated by the Linnaeus Academy Research Foundation at Linnaeus University. This award has been given every two years since 2016. A portion of the award goes to the recipient and the other part goes to the Faculty of Technology at Linnaeus University to use for research collaboration projects.
About Linnaeus University
Linnaeus University is located in Växjö and Kalmar, Sweden. Its Faculty of Technology has a cutting-edge Department of Forestry and Wood Technology. With their campuses surrounded by some of the most important areas in Europe for forestry, they have an emphasis on sustainable use.
With single-use plastics on their way to being banned and the demand for recyclable and biodegradable materials growing as a result, UBC researchers are intensifying their efforts to find cost-effective, technically viable solutions.
A multi-disciplinary team of researchers from UBC Faculty of Forestry, Faculty of Applied Science and the university’s Bioproducts Institute undertook a comprehensive review that adds critical perspectives about packaging products most commonly used for disposable food packaging – which equates to the largest single demand for plastics globally.
“Over 40 percent of all industrial packaging is devoted to food wrapping and packaging with 40 percent of that packaging made from plastics, “says UBC Forestry professor Chunping Dai. “Knowing that this represents the biggest contributor to plastic waste, we wanted to carefully analyze moulded pulp fibres as an alternative to these plastic products to see how they rate against both bioplastics and petroleum plastics.”
Current Use of Moulded Pulp Fibres
Common sources of moulded pulp fibres include recycled fibres, wood and non-wood fibres. Moulded pulp product examples include egg and fruit trays, horticultural trays and industrial packaging for items such as electronics. For food packaging, virgin fibres are typically used, including those from sugar cane bagasse, wheat straw and bamboo fibres. These materials are replacing wood as the principal fibre source due to “their cost effectiveness, wide availability and rapid renewability,” explains Dai.
Many Bioplastics Are Non-Biodegradable
Bioplastics can be produced from renewable biomass sources such as corn starch, vegetable fats and oils or recycled food waste. They are considered a better environmental alternative to petroleum-based plastics; however, many challenges exist related to their end of life since many of them are not biodegradable, says Dr. Dai.
“Our review of existing literature confirmed that around half of all bioplastics produced are non-biodegradable and those that are biodegradable require tightly controlled processing conditions.”
In the recently published open-access paper Moulded pulp fibers for disposable food packaging: A state-of-the-art review, the group’s review analyzed the manufacturing of moulded pulp food packaging using non-wood fibres. Both the process and performance additives used in the production cycle and properties pertinent to this specific type of packaging were investigated.
The team’s findings concluded numerous challenges still exist for the moulded pulp food container industry.
“Despite all of the production advances that have been made, our study definitively shows there are still challenges to overcome,” adds co-author, Bioproducts Institute Scientific Director and Canada Excellence Research Chair in Bioproducts and fellow faculty member Dr. Orlando Rojas.
In the case of bioplastics, Rojas explains they too have evolved from previous forms but still cannot outpace the petroleum plastic market as they have a number of production challenges ranging from supply chain issues to the ongoing need for chemical performance additives including petroleum-based additives that tend to hamper recycling efforts.
To overcome these challenges and thereby improve market competitiveness for both bioplastics and fibre-based food packaging, Dai and the team are recommending more comprehensive municipal waste programs and proactive government policies be put into place and improvements be made to the current composting and recycling waste pathways. His team also recommends further evaluation of moulded pulp food container biodegradability and product development using different fibre mixes and non-toxic performance additives.
Demonstrations could move novel forest operations and high-tech equipment into the mainstream
Jill Kantelberg
Born and raised in Calgary, Jill Kantelberg spent her summers camping and hiking with her family in BC’s interior where she marvelled at verdant forests of pine, spruce and aspen. This experience, and the times she has ridden horseback under the trees in Germany and France, informed the passion the interior designer has for the natural beauty of the forest, along with her powerful desire to support innovative harvesting practices.
Jill and her partner Michael McCain’s transformational gift of $250,000 to move Canada towards continuous cover forestry practices is making possible innovative research, teaching and partnerships led by UBC Forestry Prof. Suzanne Simard and Assoc. Prof. Dominik Roeser.
Continuous cover forest management systems retain tree densities and formations that best suit the local climate and ecosystem. Also known as selective or partial harvesting, the approach involves removing only a select number of trees, leaving many still in place. The practice originated in Europe in the late 1800s, and has been mainly used there up to now. This has opened the door for BC to become a leader in demonstrating the potential of continuous cover forestry.
Suzanne and Dominik’s multidisciplinary research will showcase this approach to forest management within UBC Forestry’s 5,157-hectare Malcolm Knapp Research Forest near Maple Ridge within the Lower Mainland’s temperate rainforest, along with the 10,000-hectare Alex Fraser Research Forest near Williams Lake in the interior dry-belt of BC.
Building on Suzanne’s Mother Tree Project, Suzanne and Dominik’s continuous cover forestry practices project will identify and fine-tune partial retention silviculture systems that best suit the parameters of local conditions, values and objectives. This will involve mapping and recording the carbon sequestration, biodiversity protection, forest regeneration and timber harvesting potential of the continuous cover method.
Suzanne and Dominik’s project is building consensus among different branches of forestry by combining learnings from research into the interconnectedness of trees with novel operational solutions. The end goal will be to demonstrate how this collaboration can yield positive results that can be carried forward to future projects, partners and teams.
The Mother Tree Project found that current harvesting techniques can result in the loss of 60% of forest floor carbon sequestration, along with mosses and lichens that are important stores of water and nutrients within forests.
Suzanne and Dominik’s continuous cover project will test how smaller equipment designed for the selective harvesting of trees can minimize impacts to the forest floor and biodiversity during harvesting.
“Continuous cover gives us another forest management tool,” says Dominik. “The research that we are conducting thanks to Jill and Michael’s support can set the scene, and help us understand the bottlenecks and potentialities when it comes to achieving our objectives with continuous cover forestry practices and technology in the province.”
UBC Forestry warmly welcomes Dr. Felix Wiesner, renowned leader in sustainable timber engineering, to our Department of Wood Science as an Assistant Professor in Sustainable Timber-Built Environment – Fire Safety.
Dr. Wiesner is an expert in fire safety engineering, with a focus on the fire performance of timber buildings and infrastructure. He has extensive experience in large-scale compartment fire tests to assess the fire dynamics in engineered timber buildings and their structural response.
With a multidisciplinary lens and a global perspective, we are so excited to learn from Dr. Wiesner about the possibilities of engineered wood, and the future of the field in our interview below.
Tell us about yourself!
“I recently joined UBC Forestry as Assistant Professor for Fire Safety in the Sustainable Timber-build Environment. Previously, I worked at the University of Queensland as a Lecturer in Timber Engineering and was part of the Fire Safety Engineering Research Group. Before that, I completed my Master’s and PhD at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland.
Originally, I am from Germany, so I think it is fair to say that I have been around a bit. Outside of work I enjoy cycling, running, hiking and skiing. So far, it seems that I have come to a good place to enjoy these activities. On rainy days I like to make pizza and to relax with a good book or play board games with friends.”
Can you give us an overview of your research? What drew you to this work?
“I started my undergraduate degree in Civil & Environmental Engineering; this was at the University of Edinburgh, which has one of the oldest and best-developed fire safety engineering programs in the world. After getting exposed to fire safety engineering, I was drawn to its multifaceted approach and its many design aspects. I then changed my degree to Structural and Fire Safety Engineering, completed an internship for Arup, and completed my Master’s degree on the effect of localized fires on steel columns. I enjoyed it so much that I decided to also complete my PhD on it—this time on the structural fire safety of engineered timber, which was becoming increasingly popular but the fire safety aspects of it were not well defined or understood. I have worked with timber and its fire performance ever since.
My work with timber and fire safety has focused on multiple aspects: the fire dynamics (i.e. how long and hot a fire burns) in buildings with large amounts of timber, the structural behaviour of timber in fire (i.e. how long can timber carry load for during and after a fire), and the flammability of timber and wood products (i.e. how does the material ignite and how much heat will it contribute to a fire).”
Why is fire performance of engineered wood important in today’s built environments? What do you hope to see in the future for this field?
Engineered wood has the potential to significantly reduce the carbon footprint of the construction industry; after all, wood is a renewable material. However, the drive for sustainability cannot be allowed to compromise on building occupants’ rights to a safe environment to work and live in. Beyond the immediate life safety of occupants and emergency services, it is also important to consider property protection. A timber building that burns down during its design life will not be sustainable, plus the larger fuel load in timber buildings might affect adjacent property as well—past mass conflagrations of timber cities have significantly shaped our current building codes. It is not possible to prevent all fires, but it is important to design buildings to ensure that a fire does not cause the loss of life or the whole building.
Some fire testing methodologies are over one hundred years old, yet building design and materials have evolved significantly and these test methods are not always suitable for timber. A fire in an individual building is relatively rare. As a consequence, design flaws in the built environment are often only discovered years after a construction material and method have been established and, at this point, remediations will be costly. Therefore, fire safety engineering considerations must be considered in innovations in the built environment.
Ultimately, buildings should be designed holistically and fire safety has to work closely with other aspects of the design process. Even if you design a building to have exceptional fire performance, that won’t be good enough if the building experiences collapse or has to be demolished due to issues of durability.
One of the exciting aspects of working with engineered timber products is that they enable design interventions at the product level and the overall building design. For example, one of our recent research outputs has shown clearly how changing the adhesive and the way boards are configured in engineered wood wall panels can change the fire performance significantly. The need to consider design across multiple scales and disciplines makes fire safety for innovative timber products both challenging and exciting and highlights the need for innovative assessment methods and design solutions.
What are you looking forward to most here at UBC?
I am looking forward to working with diverse groups of people within the Faculty of Forestry and the Department of Wood Science. The faculty combines a wide range of research areas, and this opens up opportunities for multidisciplinary research. I feel like I learn something new about wood and forest science every day through my interactions with my colleagues.
I am really excited to work with my colleagues in the sustainable timber-built environment cluster where we combine expertise over a wide range of issues relevant to timber buildings. Through this, and the extraordinary leadership in BC on mass timber buildings, we will develop important research and teaching solutions for future timber buildings.
At the same time, I am looking forward to life on a great campus in a city full of beautiful sights and fun things to do.
Assistant Forestry Technician at Strategic Natural Resource Consultants in Campbell River, BC
For my third co-op term, I have been working as an Assistant Forestry Technician for Strategic Natural Resource Consultants. My first month I worked on a contract with BC Hydro, inventorying the vegetation under power lines. More recently I have been working as a silviculture surveyor. I walk into cutblocks multiple years after they have been harvested and planted, then survey the health and arrangement of the trees that are regenerating in the cutblock. Applying skills I learned at UBC relating to tree and disease identification has helped prepare me for my tasks as a silviculture surveyor. Given that I work on Vancouver Island, I have already had the privilege of experiencing the challenging and beautiful terrain that defines coastal British Columbia. The opportunity to gain first hand experience of the operational side of forestry in B.C. through the co-op program has given me an understanding of the forestry industry that I would not have been able to receive if I did not get out of the classroom and into the field.
UBC Forestry warmly congratulates Dr. Nicholas Coops for being named the 2022 Canadian Institute of Forestry (CIF-IFC) Scientific Award Recipient.
The award honours individuals who have made innovative and outstanding achievements in forestry research in Canada. Award winners are recognized for developing new practices, processes, or techniques, or for demonstrating the practical applications of research in forestry.
Coops has been recognized for his research on the applications of remote sensing data in forestry. Award judges also recognized his extensive contributions to the scientific community and his position as Editor-in-Chief of the Canadian Journal of Remote Sensing for more than a decade.
Among his many Canadian and international scientific awards is the world’s most prestigious forestry honour, the Marcus Wallenberg Prize. In 2020, Coops and his colleagues Richard Wang of Oregon State University and Joseph Landsberg of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization in Australia received the award for their satellite imagery work in addressing one of the most significant global challenges of our time – understanding forests’ response to climate change.
About CIF
Formed in 1908, the CIF-IFC is the national voice of forest practitioners and many others with an interest in forestry and forests. The Institute strives to provide national leadership, promote competence, and foster public awareness of Canadian and international forestry/forest issues.
UBC Forestry is excited to welcome Dr. Minghao Li, Associate Professor in Sustainable Timber-build Environment, to the Department of Wood Science. With an extensive research background in high-performance engineered wood products and connection systems, multi-story mass timber and timber-steel hybrid structures, Dr. Li joins our newly formed Wood Building Science and Technology Cluster to continue to advance innovative solutions to complex structural issues.
In our interview below, we join Dr. Li to learn more about what drew him to his work, his hopes for the future of sustainable buildings, and what he’s most excited about at UBC.
Tell us about yourself!
“My name is Dr. Minghao Li, and I’m joining as a new Associate Professor in the Department of Wood Science. I received my Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Civil and Structural Engineering at Tongji University, in China and my Ph.D. degree from UBC. From 2014 to 2022, I worked as a Lecturer, Senior Lecturer, Associate Professor and chaired the Structures Cluster in the Department of Civil and Natural Resources Engineering at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand.”
Can you give us an overview of your research? What drew you to this work?
“My research areas include multi-story and tall timber structures; engineered timber products and connections; and innovative seismic design technologies for mass timber and timber-hybrid structures. The global trend of building larger and taller structures with wood has imposed significant challenges for engineering design. Conventional timber building technologies are struggling to provide sound and reliable solutions to meet building code requirements. My work aims to expand the use of wood into larger building applications that used to be dominated by concrete or steel and develop innovative solutions for timber buildings that can achieve both cost efficiency and structural efficiency.”
What types of questions do you attempt to address in your research?
“Some typical research questions are: Can we develop innovative/better solutions to improve structural performance and reduce construction cost for timber buildings? Can we develop innovative seismic bracing systems that can not only protect lives but also reduce repair cost after a major event? How can we improve building resilience under natural hazards?”
What do you hope to see for the future of sustainable timber building solutions?
“We aim to develop a holistic solution for safe, resilient, affordable and sustainable timber buildings that meet all societal, economic and environmental expectations.”
What are some of your favourite examples of building structures that exemplify your research?
“There are a few buildings on UBC campus, such as the Earth Science Buildings and Brock Commons, that adopt innovative timber or timber hybrid technologies and my research aims to make contributions in those areas.”
What are you looking forward to most here at UBC?
“BC is leading the world in tall and mass timber building applications and innovations. UBC has also become a global leader delivering research and teaching excellence in the sustainable timber-built environment. I look forward to contributing to innovative timber solutions and helping establish a successful course-based master program that educates more qualified design professionals with mass timber expertise.”
