Congratulations to our winner of the “In the Field Research Contest” Maria Alejandra Chadid Hernandez!
Maria is a PhD student in Ecosystem Science and Management at the University of Northern British Columbia. She is a member of the Conservation Solutions Lab and is researching climate change’s effects on partial harvesting!
“In British Columbia, partial harvesting has been little investigated in regards to climate change at different scales. Because of this gap, and the long timeframes required to obtain data from field-trials, little is known about the response of forest carbon pools following this kind of disturbance. As a consequence, the multiple partial harvest operations and the resulting stands remain as a source of uncertainty not only when quantifying and projecting forest carbon stocks but also when determining sustainable forest management strategies in the province and other regions in Canada.
The overall objective of this research project is to enhance our understanding of how partial harvesting alters forest carbon stocks compared to clearcutting with no harvest, and how this relates to changes in other forest values such as habitat, biodiversity, etc. This will be accomplished by assessing specific large-scale, long-term, replicated and controlled silvicultural trials across BC that were established during the late 90s and early 2000s.
This photo was taken in June 2020 while working at the East twin site, which is part of the Northern Wetbelt Trials. One of the members of the crew is taking DBH measures on a Cedar in a challenging position due to the difficulties of the terrain (it was very steep, lots of fallen trees and very wet soil due to the recent significant amount of rain)”.
