Discover the Atlantic Forestry Centre

By Véronique Taylor
June 2011

The AFC in Fredericton, New Brunswick

With two offices — one in Fredericton, New Brunswick, and the other in Corner Brook, Newfoundland and Labrador — the Atlantic Forestry Centre (AFC) is a true Atlantic institution. One of Natural Resources Canada’s (NRCan’s) five Canadian Forest Service (CFS) regional centres across the country, the AFC has more than 100 employees and is home to some of Canada’s leading forest research.

NRCan’s two national research forests, Petawawa and Acadia, are managed out of the AFC. These living laboratories are used by researchers, scientists and their partners to address issues and challenges in forest management practices.

The AFC in Fredericton is home to Canada’s forest genetic resource bank, the National Tree Seed Centre (NTSC), which preserves tree seed for research and conservation purposes and provides state-of-the-art greenhouse and nursery facilities to further advance research capabilities for AFC scientists.

Some examples of major research projects currently under way at the AFC are:

Forest Invasive Alien Species

AFC scientists, researchers and technicians are working on the serious problems caused by invasive forest insects. One insect, the brown spruce longhorn beetle (BSLB), an invasive pest native to Europe, has been causing extensive damage since it appeared in Nova Scotia in 1998.

Over the last decade, AFC researchers have helped combat its spread in several ways: by improving detection and monitoring capabilities, developing models to predict the risk of spread, discovering various methods to reduce these risks, and examining innovative pheromone-based mating disruption and trapping techniques.

Kevin Porter, who heads the AFC’s Knowledge Synthesis Group, tells us that “as society tries to deal with alien species such as the BSLB, this type of research and the resulting data are vital to policy development and decision-making, which in turn ensure the health of our forests and the strength of our forest sector.”

Improving Forest Inventory and Mapping Wood Fibre Attributes

A female Brown Spruce Longhorn Beetle

Canada’s forest products industry has a competitive advantage over other nations: strong wood fibre. That’s why AFC researchers along with their Canadian Wood Fibre Centre (CWFC) counterparts and many other partners are looking at new methods and tools to enhance current forest inventories with detailed analyses of wood fibre attributes. Using the latest remote sensing and geospatial mapping technologies, they aim to integrate fibre attribute data into Newfoundland’s existing forest inventory. The resulting enhanced inventory will help support decision-making in forest management and improve the industry’s efficiency in utilizing attributes in a cost-beneficial way.

Climate Change Impacts and Adaptation

As our climate changes, so must our forest management practices. CFS scientists throughout the country are conducting research to provide knowledge and tools to key decision makers in Canada’s forest sector, enabling them to make informed decisions about how they can best adapt their management practices to climate change.

At the AFC, a team of scientists and researchers is working on developing a climate-dependent growth model for tree species commonly found in the Acadian Forest — a unique eastern North American ecosystem that encompasses all three Maritime provinces, some southern parts of Quebec and northern New England — to help identify stand productivity based on various climate variables.

Anthony Taylor, a plant ecology research scientist in Fredericton, explains: “Our ultimate goal is to provide sound research findings to facilitate the incorporation of climate change considerations into all aspects of sustainable forest management, piece by piece.”

Ecosystem-based Management

The AFC in Corner Brook, Newfoundland and Labrador

The concept of ecosystem-based management (EBM), although not new, is just now starting to become more widely adopted in Canada as a working model to balance the interdisciplinary fields of natural resource management, planning and evidence-based policy. At the AFC’s Corner Brook lab, research is using this innovative model to create a decision-support framework for land management that evaluates the effects of natural disturbances, forest management and climate change on social, ecological and economic values in the Humber River Basin of western Newfoundland.

The AFC’s EBM project is examining the relationships within the ecosystem, including human interactions, to create a comprehensive approach to land management, including methods and tools, to enhance policy and decision-making.

“We want to find ways of maximizing the rewards we get from the forest, while minimizing the risks to ourselves and to the long-term ecosystem integrity,” says Brian Eddy, an ecological risk analyst with the project.

For more information, visit the Atlantic Forestry Centre.

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