Forest Co-op 
Prescribed Burn Project
Over the past 5 decades, almost 400 prescribed burns have been lit and utilized as a silviculture and vegetative management tool treating in excess of 130,000 hectares of forest land. A major challenge in this project was to capture and catalogue this large investment. To this end the project team assessed over 300 burns that fit the criteria of being pure jack pine or black spruce stands. 282 new plots were established in selected stands found within the boundaries of these prescribed burns. Existing permanent sample plots (PSPs) and permanent growth plots (PGPs), 4500m2 and 400m2 respectively, that fell within the selection criteria of the sampling design, were added to the data set to give a total plot count of close to 700 plots available to the project. Having the plot design mimic that of the Forest Co-op and provincial growth and yield data standard allowed for very effective synergy in the sampling.
One of the major accomplishments of the project was the cataloging and electronic capture of historical prescribed burn (PB) records. All PB records from the Boreal forest were brought together, scanned, cataloged and stored in electronic form (PDF). Analysis of these records has begun. Preliminary results show that PBs are an effective tool promoting healthy, vigorous managed stands with the benefits of the natural competition control of fire.
A number of other initiatives has grown from the original core PB work. Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources’ Aviation and Forest Fire Management and Northwest Science & Information branches joined efforts to catalogue and capture all of the PBs that occurred in the southern portion of the Area of the Undertaking which includes parts of the Great Lakes – St. Lawrence Forest. That information, combined with the existing Boreal work from this project, was incorporated into a new module of the Resource Plot Viewer giving the data a home in a tool that enables users to undertake spatial and tabular searches for PB information, to retrieve summary information, and to locate electronic PDFs of the burn reports.
Under the umbrella of this project, the Forest Co-op sponsored Keri Pidgen, an industrial NSERC M.Sc. candidate whose work will help to answer the question “Do PBs aid in the emulation of natural disturbance?”. Keri has collected vegetation and environmental data from 60 PGPs in jack pine stands, 20 from each of the following stand origins; jack pine planted after clearcutting, jack pine planted after clearcutting in conjunction with prescribed fire, and natural fire origin jack pine forests. These 60 plots were measured for the purpose of:
(1) assessing vegetation diversity in response to these disturbances and
(2) assessing structural differences of the vegetation.
The field work has been completed and the analysis is underway.