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General News · 15th May 2019
Carrie Saxifrage -CCFC
Andrew Bryant PhD of Powell River is best known for his success in helping the endangered Vancouver Island Marmot to recover a stable population. He is coming to Cortes Island, Mansons Hall on May 22 at 7 pm to present a proposal for ground-truthing the Cortes Community Forest. Please come out and enjoy Andrew’s talk, whether you plan to be “boots on the ground” in this project, or if you just want your visible support to strengthen our efforts going forward. This presentation is about ground-truthing, not about community forest operations.

Ground-truthing has long been a dream for the community forest – to have verified information about the water courses, endangered species habitat, and tree age class and species to inform long term decisions. We already have some good information – a Silva preliminary management plan from 2000, Ministry of Forests data and the Cortes Forestry General Partnership staff’s (Mark Lombard and Matt Cuscianna) boots all over the ground. And yet the 2000 plan and MoF data are incomplete and community members have expressed the desire for a better understanding of our forests and the decisions made about them.

Some Cortes Community Forest Co-op members have built their skills over the past year. It has been fun and we’re keen to share our skills with others. But we need expertise to help us create a body of information that is scientifically credible and operationally useful.

Andrew Bryant, a consulting ecologist, has experience in creating high quality science for use in landscape decision-making. He has worked with community groups, logging companies and environmental organizations. With his help, we can design a robust research method and a system to curate the information into a useful form.

Andrew has expressed interest in using the Cortes Community Forest opportunity to create a template for ground-truthing in other small scale and community forest operations. From the CCFC perspective, ground-truthing is a major project which will require many volunteer hours and we want our efforts to be as effective as possible.

Please come out and enjoy Andrew’s talk, whether you plan to be “boots on the ground” in this project, or if you just want your visible support to strengthen this project going forward.

To learn more about the Cortes Community Forest Cooperative, check out our website: https://cortescommunityforestcoop.org/