| Abstract/Description or Keywords |
The Babine River has been subject of much interest regarding land management due to its high value resources. This project was commissioned by the Babine Watershed Monitoring Trust, as part of its mandate to monitor the effectiveness of land management plans covering the Babine Watershed. These management plans are focussed on either the Bulkley Timber Supply Area in the east or the Kispiox Timber Supply Area in the west. The Babine Watershed Monitoring Trust looks at whether strategies in the land use plans are effective at meeting plan objectives and goals. The effectiveness indicators being analyzed are: for Biodiversity objective - deciduous stands, tree species and stand structure; for Maintain Timber Supply objective - timber salvage, and for Maintain Water Quality objective - equivalent clearcut area. For stand structure, in the Bulkley TSA 13.6% of cutblock area was reserved and in the Kispiox, 7.7%. The amount reserved varied by subzone, generally with greater percent in reserves in the higher elevation ESSFmc subzone than in the lower elevation SBSmc2 and ICHmc subzones. The area with deciduous tree species in the young seral stage was below natural amounts in several landscape units, especially in the SBSmc2 subzone. The cause of these findings requires further analysis. Mountain pine beetle has attacked 79,000 ha of forest in the Babine Watershed, most of it in the Bulkley Timber Supply Area. Salvage timber harvesting has occurred on 2,600 ha, or 4.3 percent of the attacked area. The Equivalent Clearcut Area (ECA), in the Kispiox TSA the Cataline watershed was over the trigger level of 20% by 15%, when the ECA was calculated in 2004, and the Gail watershed was approaching the ECA limit. With the low level of harvesting in the Cataline and Gail watersheds since the ECA was completed and the hydrological recovery through tree growth the ECA has likely decreased. None of the watersheds in the Bulkley TSA are over the ECA triggers or limits, even with the current level of MPB killed trees added as equivalent to clearcut. An analysis of ECA done for the Bulkley TSA in 2011, found that none of the identified sensitive watersheds in the Bulkley portion of the Babine Watershed exceed ECA targets. There are issues with the methods used for several indicators. The tree species analysis appears to have been subdivided into units that are too small to effectively represent landscape scale patterns. Differences in mountain pine beetle mapping methods in by the BC Forest Service and the forestry company leads to some uncertainty about the area attacked by mountain pine beetle. |
