Management Plans | September 1, 2024
Quadra Hill Forests: Ecological Restoration Prescription
Restoration plan for Quadra Hill (DL 58)
ViewWe can’t make young forests older. But can we help to create old-growth characteristics in younger forests? Is it possible to “restore” a forest?
Over half of the forests on Galiano Island are recovering from the impacts of industrial forestry, and many of these forests pose a danger to the community because of the high fuel loads they carry. These young, simplified forests lack diversity and are often dominated by a single tree species – the Douglas-fir. Almost nothing grows in the understory, and very few species can find habitat here. These deep, dark woods recall the cautionary fairytales many of us were told as children.
Like much of Galiano Island, the Quadra Hill property was owned and logged by forestry giant MacMillan Bloedel. After it was sold to private owners, just under 10 hectares of second growth forest were logged again in the 1990s. The third-growth forests that regenerated were characteristic of so many other forests on Galiano Island – they were dark, dense, lacking in diversity, and carry heavy fuel loads. When the GCA acquired Quadra Hill in 2023, we knew that we had to do something to help these forests to recover.
The first step in this process was mapping out the impacts of historical logging. We used an increment borer to extract cores from trees across the property. These pencil-thick tree sections allow us to age individual trees by counting their rings. Then, we compared our tree core data with historical aerial photographs and LiDAR imagery to cross-reference our dates and determine the extent of historic logging activity. What emerged was a patchwork of cut-blocks across the property. For our first forest restoration project, we chose to focus on stands that were last harvested between 1987 and 1996. You can see from the LiDAR image below that these forests (labelled with turquoise hatching) are much denser, more uniform, and have shorter trees than the surrounding, more mature forests. Often, tree densities in these areas exceed1000 trees per hectare!
What should forests like this look like? The truth is, it’s hard to know for sure. Road construction, soil disturbance, drainage ditches, clear-cutting, fire suppression, hyper-abundant deer populations, and high-density planting of a single tree species are all factors that have impacted the development of these forests. But we do know from studies of intact old-growth forests that these forests have high levels of structural and biological diversity, as well as a lot of variation produced by past disturbance events. They often have an order of magnitude less individual trees than younger forests like those found on Quadra Hill, but those older trees are much larger and store huge amounts of carbon. These large old trees are found in multi-layered canopies, which increases their carbon storage. The large old trees and multi-layered canopies are perforated with openings or “canopy gaps,” which make these old forests much more resistant to wildfire, compared to dense, young forests.
We have very few remaining examples of this kind of forest in the Coastal Douglas-fir zone. We have to use the clues that remain – a scattering of old-growth individuals, the patterns of old stumps across the landscape, historical studies – to piece together a picture that we can work with.
Our first step was to reach out to local biologist Keith Erickson and recently retired professional forester and author Herb Hammond, who were both very involved with our forest restoration work in the Pebble Beach Reserve. We learned some lessons from that project that we were able to apply here, and together we produced a forest restoration prescription for Quadra Hill.
The next step was to create permanent study plots where we could follow the evolution of Quadra Hill’s forests after we applied various treatments. We established 10 representative circular monitoring plots and trained a team of students from Dr. Eric Higgs’ 2024 University of Victoria Restoration field course to document the baseline conditions in those plots. The students took photographs and a wide range of measurements, including tree height, tree density, and the size and quantity of woody debris of the ground.
In the late summer of 2024, we took the first steps towards forest restoration by pruning all of the dead lower branches that we could reach across our treatment areas. These branches – known as “ladder fuels” – constituted the lowest rungs in a ladder of dead fine fuels that connected deadwood on the ground to the tree canopy. By removing this connection, we opened up the understory and made it less likely that a fire on the ground would travel up into the canopy. Pruning also makes it much easier to safely move through the forest!
By fall of 2024, the lower branches had been removed and it was time to mark trees for selective removal. Guided by our forest restoration prescription, we first marked smaller trees that were dead, suppressed, dangerous, or unhealthy. Then, we made a second pass to mark larger trees that, when removed, would help create larger gaps and allow light to penetrate to the understory. Finally, we made sure to mark trees around small elements of diversity that already existed in the forest that we wished to promote: these included deciduous trees, pockets of understory vegetation, and wildlife trees.
Finally, it was time to cut some trees down. Our approach was variable density thinning, meaning we didn’t want the result to be uniform. Instead, we removed between 40 and 60% of the stems, depending on the stand and our desired outcome. Falling trees in a forest this dense is not easy because they quickly become hung up on one another. It took a team of skilled professionals working for several weeks to get the job done! We extend our gratitude to Tim Thomas, Josh Howieson, Laurie Baines, and Ryan Baines for spearheading this effort.
Most of the thinning work on Quadra Hill relied on chainsaws, but in one of our treatment areas we are deploying the chain hoist system originally devised by Ken Millard for our Pebble Beach forest restoration program to thin trees by pulling them down. This process takes longer than using a chainsaw, but a huge benefit is that anyone can participate in restoring the forest this way – even groups of schoolchildren! Additionally, instead of leaving behind a stump, the chain hoist system pulls out the whole root ball, simulating the natural process of “windthrow”, where trees are blown over in windstorms. The resulting hole in the ground helps to create the “pit and mound” topography we associate with healthy forests, and is an excellent germination site for a diversity of native plants.
Young, simplified forests lack many unique characteristics of old-growth forests, including standing dead trees that are large enough for wildlife to create cavities in them. These “legacy” features cannot be recreated overnight, but their development can be accelerated by removing the tops from existing large diameter trees. Hit the green button below to watch professional arborists as they create our future wildlife trees!
Thanks to Noah Powers and Tai Jacob for their death-defying contribution to the project.
As more and more trees were removed, we began to see the sun penetrating to the forest floor for the first time in decades! Where small gaps had existed previously, we opened up much larger gaps to allow the forest understory to recover. Walking through these open forests, we were able to begin to imagine the old-growth forest that our treatment areas would one day become.
We completed our thinning treatments in late 2024. We had successfully thinned about half of the stems from 6.5 ha of our forest treatment areas, removing about half of the fuel in the process. Now all of that fuel was on the ground, and the question quickly became – what do we do with all of it?
In future projects, we plan to harvest some for community benefit, but for this project, our focus was keeping as much of the forest carbon as possible on the property while reducing the fire risk. We deployed a variety of creative techniques to acheive this goal.
When you fall trees in dense stands, they tend to stack up on one another, forming a structure not unlike a giant campfire! This is no good at all, so the first step in fuel management is bucking those logs down until they are in direct contact with the ground. This ground contact helps them stay moist and decompose, drastically reducing the likelihood that they will become fuel for a wildfire. Once on the ground, they can help rebuild healthy soils in the restored forest.
In the Southern Gulf Islands, the risk of a wildfire starting from a natural ignition is vanishingly small. This means that to prevent wildfire in our community, we have to prevent human ignitions. One way to mitigate this risk is to remove fuels from human movement corridors, so we decided to remove both coarse and fine fuels from 10 meters on either side of the main access road on Quadra Hill. This turned out to be an expensive and time-consuming process, but the outcome is that the risk of vehicles and visitors accidentally starting a wildfire on Quadra Hill are greatly reduced.
The wood we removed from the buffers didn’t have to go far – it will be used in a wetland restoration project lower down on the same property.
A useful way to deal with large accumulations of fine fuels like branches is to turn them into biochar using a biochar kiln. “Biochar” is a fancy word for charcoal that is produced by partially combusting woody material, and then suddenly halting the combustion by removing oxygen from the equation. The resulting charcoal is a highly stable form of carbon that is an excellent soil amendment for gardens and forests. We produced several barrels of biochar for use in our forest gardens using a small kiln that we purchased from Salt Spring Island.
Forest restoration is a long-term endeavour, and we have many years of observation and stewardship ahead of us. We are currently planning an event to invite the Galiano community to visit our forest restoration areas for the first time – we’ll keep this page updated!
Thanks to Environment and Climate Change Canada, the Victoria Foundation, and the Gencon Foundation for supporting this project.
Explore the following resources to learn more about forest restoration and the Quadra Hill Nature Reserve.
Restoration plan for Quadra Hill (DL 58)
ViewReport from UVic’s ES 471 Class of 2024.
ViewBaseline report for Quadra Hill (DL 58)
View