Introduction - Getting More from Your Woodlot

LESSON THREE - DEVELOPING YOUR PLAN

THINGS TO CONSIDER FOR YOUR IRM PLAN

To help you further develop your goals and your management plan, a few elements common in IRM plans are given in the first half of this lesson. The second half of this lesson presents one possible layout for an IRM plan.

Illustration 7: Trails, streams, stands, and ecosystems do not stop at boundaries. Therefore, cooperation among neighboring landowners is important.

Ecosystem Health
With IRM plans, the primary emphasis is usually on the condition in which an ecosystem is maintained. Healthy forest ecosystem can often be maintained by:

• Harvesting weak or damaged trees while leaving enough cavity trees, snags, and coarse woody debris for wildlife (see Home Study Module 4.)
• Encouraging a mix of species to reduce risk of damage from insects or disease.
• Spacing trees apart to make sure they have enough growing space (see Home Study Module 3)
• Not making ruts, wounding trees and compacting soil.
• Being aware of insect populations near or on the woodlot.
• Ensuring areas are regenerated (see Home Study Module 5)
• Maintaining wildlife corridors
• Leaving some areas natural or untouched.

Since ecosystems do not stop at property boundaries, managing ecosystems requires working with your neighbors to ensure that things such as wildlife habitat or recreational opportunities are maintained in an area. Cooperation among landowners is vital.

Recreation and Aesthetics
As stated in the preface, outdoor recreation is important to many landowners. Woodlots provide opportunities for activities such as hiking, camping, hunting, fishing, skiing, photography, etc. Aesthetics usually play a part in the quality of recreation that a woodlot offers.

Trails cut for extracting wood can also be used for hiking, hunting, or skiing, if they are kept clear of slash. For more information on building trails, see Home Study Module 9.

Recreation and aesthetics can be improved by:

• Making cuts and activities blend into the landscape and look pleasing to the eye.
• Considering hills, contours, valleys, and views.
• Leaving a few big trees for a very pleasing look and to add to vertical structure diversity.
• Building trails, camps, campsites, etc.

If you do not live near your woodlot, a camp or cabin makes working on your woodlot much easier. Of course, it is also great for family retreats or personal recreation.

Protected Areas
Nova Scotia has a protected areas strategy that preserves almost one-fifth (20 percent) of all provincial Crown lands. These areas will help protect biodiversity by preserving areas that are typical of one of the 77 natural landscapes in Nova Scotia, rare or unique landforms, ecosystems or plants, or wilderness areas.

However, since only one-quarter of the forested area in Nova Scotia is owned by the Crown, not enough of Nova Scotia's forests are officially protected. Therefore, the role of private landownership preserving natural areas is also important.

• If you discover areas on your woodlot that are unique, or special to you, consider leaving them undisturbed.
  
  
• Have someone from the Department of Natural Resources walk your woodlot if you have protection in mind.
  
  
• Protect areas informally, or formally through provincial statutes that have provisions for private land protection (see Land Conservation Opportunities on page 23). More information is also available from the Department of Natural Resources (DNR), the Department of the Environment, or the Nova Scotia Nature Trust.

Minerals and Aggregates
Unlike most other resources on your woodlot, minerals and aggregates are non-renewable resources. Although they are a valuable resource that can be used, they cannot be replenished.

As a Nova Scotia landowner you have surface rights to aggregates, but rights to minerals, oil, and natural gas are owned by the Crown. However, a landowner or anyone else may acquire mineral rights by making application for a mineral exploration license. Similarly, rights for oil and gas exploration are given through a licensing procedure.

Stone, sand, gravel, peat, gypsum, most limestone, and ordinary soil belong to the landowner.

• Include these resources in your IRM plan if you are interested and able to use them. They may be especially useful if you plan to build any roads or trails.
• Store any top soil that is removed.
• Reclaim and seed any disturbed site once aggregate is removed.

Roads and Trails
Aesthetically and to prevent ecosystem fragmentation, IRM plans usually call for no more roads than necessary for harvesting.

Roads do not need to be permanent. The roads or access to them can be removed if they are not required for a long period or create problems.

• Because harvesting usually takes place over a short period in the life of a road, plan roads for recreation since that is what their primary use will be following harvesting.
• Keep aesthetics in mind.
• Limited use roads or trails can be built by using slab wood or sawdust which create very little disturbance to the soil or roots.

Wildlife Management
All forms of forest management affect wildlife habitat. Forest/wildlife regulations list the minimum standards that must be followed if you harvest. It is a good idea to plan for a range of wildlife habitat requirements by:

• Modifying harvest to minimize the impact on wildlife.

• Providing for current and future snags, cavity trees, and coarse woody debris.
  

Did you know that planting oak will improve wildlife habitat in addition to adding dollar value to your woodlot? For more information on improving wildlife habitat see Home Study Module 4.

Methods to improve wildlife habitat for individual species and a variety of species are described further in Home Study Module 4.

Allowing pockets of your woodlot to regenerate to alder and aspen improves habitat for woodcocks and grouse? Cutting small patches can be beneficial for wildlife. For more information see Home Study Module 4.

Certification
Forest products certification lets buyers know that wood products come from a sustainable managed forest. If you intend to sell forest products, manage your woodlot to meet certification standards at a future date. Certification may require meeting specific objectives for:

• Wildlife habitat
• Water quality
• Protection of ecologically unique areas
• Biological diversity and associated values for water resources, soils, and unique and fragile ecosystems and landscape.

Community Use
Do other people use your woodlot? Do you want to accommodate their use? Are their wishes compatible with yours? It is important to know who else uses or crosses your land for hiking or other forms of recreation. Activities you plan may reduce or enhance their ability to enjoy your property. The importance of this varies with individuals.

• Be sure that your woodlot does not contain hazards for which you could be liable if people use your property (for more information on this see Home Study Module 9).
• Allow community access to your trails, etc.

Water Quality
Maintaining water quality is important for many reasons and should be a goal of any IRM plan. It can generally be maintained by:

• Taking care during layout and construction of roads
• Not clearcutting to water edges
• Keeping machines away from streams
• Crossing streams with proper stream crossings
• Careful harvesting

Code of Practice
Many of the above land uses can be practiced by following a code of practice or best management practices. Two examples are suggested in the reading section on page 22 that use the latest information to ensure work is completed to high standards.

WRITING THE PLAN

After establishing priorities for your woodlot, you are on your way to writing a management plan that has measurable objectives to fulfill your most important goals.

You can make your plan simple or detailed. Some landowners keep a plan in their head, but it helps to have it on paper to refer to, especially if you run your woodlot as a business. Make it a useful document to guide the management of your woodlot. Do not be concerned with all the details at this point. Your plan will evolve.

The following basic outline may guide you as you develop your plan.

• Introduction
  • Owner Identification
  • Woodlot Location
  • Background
  • Goals and Objectives
• Woodlot Description
  • Map
  • Boundary line conditions
  • Significant feature
  • Stand or Ecosystem description
• Recommendations
  • Zoning
  • Activities or action plan
  • Operating plans
• Summary
• Sources of Further information
• Record keeping information

Introduction
The introduction should provide more detail on the goals you developed on page 5. It should also include woodlot history, which might be useful or meaningful to you.

Woodlot Description
Use the list of resources you came up with on page 7 to help describe your woodlot. You can do this yourself, with a family member, or hire a forest professional to provide detailed cruise information or recommendations about opportunities for your woodlot.

Next, develop a map. It can be hand drawn, traced from a photo or map, or computer generated. Landowners have sometimes excluded areas from forestry management plans because the land was for development, a farm, or homestead. This is an IRM plan, not a forestry plan. It may be useful to include all lands and zone (see page 15 on zoning) accordingly. For example, if you have land you may eventually sell for real estate purposes, you may be able to harvest wood from it now, possibly as a thinning to promote quality shade trees.

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Exercise 5: Develop a map with zones identified on woodlot; you can use your own definition of zones if you wish - rough it out, and get more detailed as you learn more.

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Recommendations
Finally, keeping the fundamental principles in mind, devise activities that will help meet your goals. Listing these activities makes it easy to follow the progress of your management plan. As mentioned earlier, it may take several activities to fulfill a goal, but one objective can also fulfill more than one goal.

If you listed a variety of goals in your introduction, consider breaking the woodlot into different zones that describe activities that can take place. The woodlot can have areas where different activities or goals are given priority.

Illustration 8. Zoning may help establish priorities for your woodlot.

There are generally three types of zones:

• Multiple use where most activities have equal priority
• Special use where one use dominates and other uses are avoided
• Priority use where one activity takes priority over others, but does not exclude them

Most forests can be zoned as multiple use because they can maintain many activities. A few forest areas require special protection (eg. unique habitat). Some areas fall into the special use category if they are managed intensively for wood production, Christmas trees, or recreation.

Zoning may change over time as priorities change or a stand changes. For example, an area with a mature stand may be priority for wood production. However, once a young regenerating stand is established following harvest, use may change to primarily recreation. Thus zoning can be dependent both on forest cover and time. Once you come up with specific activities, you may find that your objectives/goals are more easily met by changing your zones.

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Exercise 6: Try to list a few activities below. It will probably be useful to group them according to which goals they meet.

Goals and Activities

Goal 1. __________________________

Goal 2. __________________________

Goal 3. __________________________

Goal 4. __________________________

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Operating plans provide a clear schedule of when you plan to carry out specific activities. Table 4 shows a simple operating plan. More detailed plans can be found in Module 10A. As you develop your operating plan, it will help you develop a time line to meet your goals.

Remember, operating plans are not carved in stone. They are simply guides subject to change as priorities and resources change.

Table 4: A sample five-year operating plan.

ACTIVITIES	YEAR 1	YEAR 2	YEAR 3	YEAR 4	YEAR 5
renew boundary lines	X
plant berry producing trees and shrubs	X
build main access road		X
build and install nest boxes			X
build log cabin			X
thin red spruce stand		X
prune white pine crop trees				X
cut out trail along stream					X
build skating/fire pond					X

Exercise 7: Develop your own plan based on activities you identified earlier.

ACTIVITIES	YEAR 1	YEAR 2	YEAR 3	YEAR 4	YEAR 5

Lesson 3 Quiz