Image of a dry cut block not being able to sustain seedlings.

Image Credit: SUBMITTED/Taryn Skalbania

Tree planting in the wake of clear-cuts isn't as successful as it may seem and is causing dire consequences for local wildlife, increasing the risks of floods and wildfires and slowly killing forests, according to the founder of an Okanagan environmental group.

Taryn Skalbania, the founder of the Peachland Watershed Protection Alliance, says the solution is to stop clear-cutting.

The way tree replanting is operated results in low rates of survival and in the cases where trees survive, the plantations are not natural to the environment, leaving wildlife, the environment and local communities at risk.

"Because tree replanting is such a failure, we need to stop clear-cutting any native forest that's still left, which is less than 30%, because we need our forests," Skalbania says. "It sounds radical but our forests aren't growing back and we don't know how to do that successfully yet so we need to stop. Logging companies will just have to reinvent themselves."

Tree planting is required from logging companies after they go into a forest and clear cut. Companies are mostly planting one type of tree, the pine tree, which does not properly recreate the state of native forests leading to several consequences on the environment, as well as, local communities, she says.

"If that keeps going on, if forestry is given free-range, our 13 unique ecosystems will turn into fake forests or tree farms or all one homogeneous ecosystem across BC composed of commercial trees that can create profit, but that isn't what the environment needs," Skalbania says. "When they say they're reforesting, they're not, they're just replanting."

When tree planters go into clear-cut areas, they will mostly plant pine trees and they plant as many as they can, she says. This results in monocultures which are not what would be seen in a native forest, resulting in low survival rates. Pine trees are chosen because they are one of the cheapest tree species, they grow fast and, initially, they have good survival rates.

"These trees are only viable if they're in an entire ecosystem of complementary, nitrogen-producing deciduous environments which the forest industry does not provide them with," Skalbania says. "The government will tell you they replant three trees for everyone that is cut down, but how many actually survive?"

Anna Mongrain works as a tree planter for Windfirm Resources, a contractor for Vancouver-based forest products company Canfor, and has been told the seedlings she plants have a 25% chance of survival.

"It's not because we don't plant them well. It's because the soil, or the areas where we plant, don't have the right conditions so the trees don't grow very well and a lot of them die," Mongrain says. "I'm going to be totally honest, usually tree planters don't really care about the survival of the trees because we just want to make the money."

Conditions caused by climate change are partly responsible along with the conditions forests find themselves in as a result of clear-cuts.

"Extreme conditions and overly exposed conditions, as created by clear-cuts, aren't natural in a lot of respects so that's one of the reasons tree plantations aren't always successful," Stop the Spray BC founder and forest policy expert James Steidle says.

When the soil is exposed by a clear cut, he says the soil dries up very fast and doesn't create the best conditions for replanted trees.

On top of that, Steidle says there's a process called "brushing" where workers kill all the leafy or deciduous trees in the planting area to remove the pine tree seedlings' competition. He points to research that has shown the failure of planting goes up when brushing is involved.

"What's going on is that basically everything other than pine likes to grow under deciduous (trees) so that's one of the reasons why anything that isn't pine is not growing successfully."

Having forests solely composed of pine trees is unnatural and causes dire consequences.

"When you look at a bioclimatic ecosystem index zone map you can see that very little of our forests are supposed to be pine. Like all around Kelowna it's supposed to be Douglas firs, but when you look around there, it's all pine trees," Steidle says.

"Simplifying the plantation increases the failure rate, the susceptibility to disease, reduces the biodiversity and the carrying capacity which is how many species can live in an ecosystem," he says.

"Pine plantations are really bad for wildlife, nothing really eats pine trees. Pine trees have very low biodiversity values so if you have really dense pine plantations, after about 20 years, the light disappears from the forest floor so it becomes a very devalued, impoverished ecosystem.

"If you had deciduous (trees) the biodiversity could be maintained for the whole lifetime of the forest."

Skalbania with Peachland Watershed Protection Alliance says it takes hundreds of years for the planted pine seedlings to grow and die to replace lost wildlife habitat.

"We've completely decimated the natural habitat of wildlife in the area. We're known for being super natural and green in BC, but we are not environmentally supportive at all," she says.

"A clearcut might as well be a 12-foot fence around an area because the area becomes more covered in snow so now the routes animals use yearly to migrate are covered in too much snow for them to travel through as they normally have for the last 10,000 years, so instead, they move to the city which causes our deer problem."

The replanted forests cannot regulate the melting of the snow like a regular forest would and that causes flooding. On top of that, the pine tree plantations increase the risk of wildfire.

"We're basically growing the most fire-prone trees on a landscape that is known for wildfires," Stop the Spray's Steidle says.

Steidle says the last time the BC government did an inventory of the reforested areas was in 2008 in the Tree Species Composition and Diversity in British Columbia report.

"It's gotten way worse since then," he says.

The environmentalists answer to the clear cutting problem is to replace it with more sustainable practices like selective logging.

"If you do selective logging, such as the community forest mill in the Kootenays that doesn't have to replant, 90% of what grows back does so naturally because they don't clear-cut so they don't ruin the earth, the nature and they don't have to waste money on replanting," Skalbania says.

While stopping clear cutting would have an impact on the forestry industry in the province, Skalbania argues it's actually not responsible for that many jobs.

"Only one to 2% of workers in BC work in logging, weigh that against the destruction it's causing. Is it really worth it? I certainly don't think so."

To find out more about about Skalbania and Steildle's organizations, your can check out their websites Peachland Watershed Protection Alliance and Stop the Spray BC.

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