When humans have changed a landscape as profoundly as they have in some parts of the coastal temperate rainforest,
there is a responsibility to start addressing some of the problems that that might cause.
I would argue that on our west coast logging changes these ecosystems more fundamentally
than it does just about anywhere else in British Columbia or Canada.
So I think there is a great need and a responsibility to try and deal with some of these problems that we've created.
Well everything in forests, everything on earth depends on light.
Plants are the only organisms on earth that can make their own food.
Everything else on earth depends upon plants and the plants depend upon the light for food.
So light is critical to the functioning of forests.
In the old growth forests around here you tend to get a relatively small number of trees per hectare,
but you get trees of all sizes, shapes and ages.
You have canopies that have many gaps in them that let light down to the forest floor
and so you get the development of a really lush understory of herbs and shrubs.
And that provides habitat for a wide variety of wildlife species,
as well as providing a lot of important plant products that the New Chalmouth have used for millennia.
In contrast, the second growth forests around here in areas where people have been logging,
you tend to get a large number of trees of similar size and age,
very little light getting down to the forest floor and as a result very few plants in the understory.
And all the values that are associated with those old growth forests is all lost in those second growth forests.
With a lot of these ecosystems, if you left them for another century, they would naturally thin out
and you would start to see the sort of structure that is more characteristic of the old growth stands.
But that's a long time.
And I think if you're looking at all of these values, both associated with us and with all of the other creatures that live in the forests,
there is a strong argument to be made to step in and try and open up these stands a little earlier than they would on their own.
For restoration, what we want to prioritize is where we get the biggest benefit.
The highest use habitat is in the riparian area, the area adjacent to the stream.
There's very little life in the second growth forest and we want to introduce life as fast as we can back to it.
And it's all about biodiversity and creating a number of habitat niches.
Build it and they will come.
We use old growth forests as basically our blueprint for riparian restoration.
We want to try and mimic those features of that forest in the type of techniques we use and for our end goal for restoration.
These second growth forests are very dense, so we decrease the number of trees,
allowing more light to enter and reach the forest floor to rebuild the understory of vegetation
and also to make each individual tree growing on the banks of the creek healthier.
So they'll support a healthier canopy and a healthier root mass,
which will both influence the stream and water course.
One of the biggest class of species that are impacted from pure second growth stands are called cavity dwellers,
particularly secondary cavity dwellers that rely on the holes of other birds or animals making the cavities.
So we get tree climbers to go up and take the top off the tree.
And what that does is it kills it slowly and then the insects will get in there
and that's what creates opportunity for piliated wood pickers that put in holes
and that's what makes nests for things like screech owls that don't make their own cavities.
They use the cavities of another bird.
This area on the west coast of Vancouver Island is the traditional territory of the Neuchalnuth First Nations.
We work closely with each individual nation in the region and their traditional ecological knowledge
we try to build into the restoration process.
Stewardship for Tlaukwit is born right into our principles.
Our management principles for our tribal park are all based on interconnectionness.
It goes right down to a moniker that might have been applied to our people.
We're the cedar salmon people.
Those were the two resources that would almost be synonymous with identifying Tlaukwit or Neuchalnuth people.
We use cedar in every aspect of our life yet you wouldn't know that we were harvesting cedar.
Salmon was the same thing. It was the largest part of our diet and yet our rivers were abundant
and I think that's just how everything should be working together.
Abundance and healthy sustainability.
The long-term goal is to get it to this accelerated rate of recovery and leave it alone.
It mentioned before that the second growth for us if left for 250 years will recover and all we're doing
is taking a 100-year period to try to get it growing faster.
I'm positive. Mother Earth can overcome lots. We're helping her along in the right way.
I think this place can recover beautifully and be abundant.
Thank you.
