About

The Silviculture Magazine flower was pollinated in 1977 in western Canada when treeplanting contractors and their silviculture workers combined to form the Pacific Reforestation Workers Association from which the first issues of the PRWA Newsletter germinated. (See select articles on the website.)

In 1981, co-op members in the PRWA argued that the contractors who had employees should be in a separate association, and pollinated a new notion, the Western Silviculture Contractors Association. By 1986 the PRWA Newsletter had wilted, and from 1982 to 1991 the WSCA Newsletter dominated publications of the period. In 1991, all of the regional silviculture contractor associations across Canada got together and formed the Canadian Silviculture Association. Each association began to share its issues and voices in a new, glossier and transformed magazine, the Canadian Silviculture Magazine. Formal ownership of the Canadian silviculture magazine was shared across all of the associations and Dirk Brinkman. Dirk had been the editor (from 1983 on), a contributor to the PRWA Newsletter and the President of the Canadian Silviculture Association.

In 2009, in response to increasing interest from international readers that had been emerging over the previous years, Canadian Silviculture Magazine shed the word ‘Canadian’ and transitioned to Silviculture Magazine.

Through each of these manifestations, it has been the voice of silviculture practitioners, seeking new opportunities for funding silviculture and citing new challenges, breakthroughs and insights for silviculture practitioners from all regions. However, strong content from its Canadian members gives that voice a temperate timbre.

Now exclusively digital, the online magazine has facilitated a growing authorship and readership within Canada and abroad, adding diversity to the content and value for the authors as its scope grows.

Silviculture Magazine’s readers and contributors are silviculture practitioners, contractors, technicians, foresters, woodland managers and owners. It is a platform for silviculture practitioners to translate new ideas into practical, pragmatic form and communicate this information, creating an ongoing dialog among peers. Expression and discussion propel the industry forward as we navigate a new age of forest management with pillars of environmental stewardship, social wellbeing and economic vitality.

 

Silviculture Magazine continues the tradition of

  • hosting regional voices reflecting on issues facing silviculture workers, contractors, managers and government
  • soliciting peer reviewed articles revealing new opportunities, research, insights and practices and;
  • combining academics, professionals and practitioners thinking

to echo the unique voices at the leading edge. These new voices explore new ways of working, valuing ecosystem products and services, researching efficacy, intervening in natural cycles, implementing new practices and techniques, exploring new regulations, international standards and most of all, seek to protect existing or find new funding drivers for silviculture.

What once lead in Canada can now lead in the world.

 

Areas covered in the journal include:

  • planting, where, why, how, when, who pays
  • silviculture worker health, safety, well-being and life
  • efficacy of interventions, treatment regimes and management practices, both at the stand and forest estate level
  • harvesting, full rotation management and stand tending and maintenance
  • afforestation, reforestation and restoration – from prescription to nursery, site treatment, planting, tending through free growing to maturity
  • REDD, conservation, ecosystem based forest management and certification
  • policy development and regulation, at local, community, regional, state/province, federal and international levels
  • quality assurance/ control – traditional forest mensuration and the new data collection arts of GHG verification of reduced emissions, increased removals and permanence of storage;
  • market-based mechanisms - the Kyoto Mechanisms – Emissions trading, Clean Development Mechanism and Joint Implementation, Voluntary Carbon Standard, Western Climate Initiative standards, Carbon Fix, and others;
  • measurement, reporting and verification (MRV) – challenges in, and experiences with, the design and/or application of MRV accounting approaches in developed and developing countries
  • payment for ecosystem services, products and benefits,
  • forest products and processes that fund silviculture

The professional practitioner is always the practical problem solver, and brings to ground the data and analysis of researchers and academics.