Restoring the Plantation Forests at the Pebble Beach Reserve

DL63, located within the Pebble Beach Reserve, is representative of many forested ecosystems on Galiano and throughout the Salish Sea, with a history of logging spanning a century of social, technological, and economic change.

The seizure of Indigenous territory by settlers in the 19th century introduced new approaches to forestry – approaches that were already responsible for the destruction of most of the ancient forest in Europe and much of the forested land in eastern North America at the time.  At Qw’xwulwis, the initial impacts were modest, consisting of selective logging of high-value trees by hand.

A patchy mosaic of clearings is evidence of the high-grade logging conducted with crosscut saws and steam donkeys in the early 1900’s.  For several decades after this, the remaining trees were left to grow and maintain a mature forest ecosystem on the site.  This first image was taken in 1932.

The remainder of the site was clearcut in 1978. The intensive industrial-scale treatment included the removal of every standing tree – regardless of size or species – followed by the bulldozing of top soil and slash into long linear piles called windrows. Although the site was then set ablaze, the burn failed, leaving behind the windrows and their rotting organic material. This intensive and costly treatment of the cutblock was an attempt to simplify future access to the site for planting, thinning and harvesting, as well as to control root rot.  This image was taken in 1980.

The industrial cycle was broken in 1998 when the Galiano Conservancy recognized the potential of the site to provide connectivity at the landscape scale and purchased the property for restoration. A forest restoration plan was prepared in 2002, and two years later restoration treatments were initiated to help shift the plantation’s successional trajectory towards a healthy mature forest.  The goal was not the re-creation of the forest that existed prior to industrial logging, but the reestablishing of a healthier, more diverse, and resilient forest ecosystem.

Over the course of several years, GCA staff and community members implemented a novel series of restoration treatments using only hand tools, aided by an ingenious system of hoists, chains, and pulleys devised by Ken Millard.

Culling plantation Douglas-fir trees created gaps in the canopy allowing more light to reach the forest floor. This promotes the growth of mosses, grasses, shrubs and other tree species. Any natural elements such as a red alder tree, a patch of salal or a small area of undisturbed soil around a stump that remain within the plantation are viewed as ‘anchors’ of diversity and provide a guide for choosing which plantation trees to keep and which to cull.  Topping created small-diameter wildlife trees while opening the canopy and allowing more light to reach the forest floor.  Girdling is the most efficient technique for thinning. The cambium was removed in a band around the entire circumference of trees with a specialized chisel, cutting off the transport of nutrients to the roots. Pulling trees over mimicked natural windthrow, creating a pit and mound feature on the previously scraped and flattened forest floor. The chain hoist in series with a number of chains, pulleys and cables easily brings the trees down by hand.

Within just a couple of years of the treatments, the plantation had already responded with an increase in species richness and biomass. The moss layer was the first to respond to the increase in light resulting from thinning treatments. The grasses and herbs followed quickly, along with a flourish of shoots branching off of red alder stems. Salal (Gaultheria shallon), ocean spray (Holodiscus discolour), and other shrubby species arrived slowly over time.

Most recently, a 2015 study found that the treated plots showed improved measures of biological and structural diversity.  However, the same study was unable to directly link these improvements to the restoration treatments and found that some of these differences were not statistically significant.  The author suggested that the results may have been more significant had the initial treatments been more intensive, and if there had been follow-up treatments performed in the intervening years.

These studies demonstrate the importance of long-term monitoring for generating knowledge and helping us design better restoration projects in the future.  They also suggest that future restoration treatments in the Pebble Beach Reserve could go beyond the original treatments in terms of scale and intensity without causing significant ecological harm, and yield greater benefits.  The results are promising, and the insights gleaned can be applied elsewhere on Galiano and throughout the Salish Sea.

You can visit the Pebble Beach Reserve and take a self-guided tour of the restoration areas on an interpretive trail with the help of the DL63 Forest Restoration Brochure, which is available at the McCoskrie trailhead.  Today, the Galiano Conservancy continues to use Ken Millard’s one-of-a-kind chain hoist and pulley system to pull down trees in the plantation forests of the Pebble Beach Reserve, only this time, it’s schoolchildren doing the pulling.  If a tree falls in the middle of the woods – whether or not anyone hears it – you can bet that it’s contributing to the overall complexity, health, and resilience of the forest.