Strategic Level Reserves

1. Strategic Level Reserves Lower Klina Klini Pilot

2. Purpose The purpose of strategic landscape reserve design and detailed landscape reserve planning is to identify potential hard and soft landscape reserves that provide for concurrent progress toward: • Maintenance of ecological integrity through retention of landscape scale reserves that encompass representative old forest ecosystems, riparian habitat, focal and at risk wildlife species habitat and rare and at risk plant communities;

3. Purpose • Stewardship of First Nations interests through maintenance of traditional forest resources and protection of heritage features; • Improved human well-being through provision of stable access to land and resource related economic and resource development opportunities.

4. Process • Preparation of a preliminary strategic level reserve design for the South Central, Central and North Coast sub-regions that identifies areas for consideration as hard and soft reserves, highlighting areas that optimize the location of potential hard reserves. The strategic level design will: • Satisfy the “landscape conservation budget”; • Guide preparation of detailed landscape reserve plans; and • Provide guidance to operational planning prior to completion of detailed landscape reserve plans.

5. Outputs Core outputs of the strategic reserve: • Map products and other information identifying landscape level reserves that most effectively address the landscape conservation budget and the factors and principles defined in the planning approach. • The strategic landscape reserve can be thought of as a “visual tracking system” that will show at the strategic level, where the conservation budget will be located at any given time.

6. Process Gathered information relevant to the strategic plan including: • First Nation information • Schedule 4 for the SCCO biodiversity objective 14. • Park areas/OGMA/WHA/etc. • Focal species information • Grizzly Bear • MAMU • Tailed Frog • Goats – UWR and Modelled.

7. Process • A simple Arc script was developed for identifying a potential starting point for the aspatial objective 14 requirement. • The assumption behind the script was to locate the Conservation Budget where there was a high overlap of habitat features and a low value of timber taking patch size, operability and data quality into consideration (where practicable).

8. Selection Criteria Identification of polygons is driven by SSS area required. Look first in Park areas and tourism areas, WHAs and OGMAs. Then Overlap value. 16…..0 Seral stage = old, less than old Operability = outside, inside StandValue class = 0-25, 26-50, 51-75,…….150 Polygon size = >20ha, 15-20, 10-15, 5-10, <5 So you start with OV=16, old, outside, $<25, >20ha Then OV=16, old, outside, $<25, 15-20 ha Once the size criteria is exhausted you go to 15….. until you meet your area requirement.

9. Selection Criteria G bear class 1 = 4 G Bear class 2 = 1 Goat UWR = 5 Goat model habitat: <0.25 = 1 0.25<0.75 = 2 >0.75 = 3 Mamu class 1 = 2 Mamu class 2 = 2 Mamu class 3 = 1 Tailed frog creeks = 2 Based on the features in a polygon it gets an overlap value, maximum value is 16.

10. Modeled Output

11. Process • Once the conservation budget is modeled an intelligent design of the fragmented area is completed taking the same input information into account.

12. Intelligent Design

13. Analysis • Analysis on the performance of the initial reserve area was completed and the boundary revised to fine tune the strategic design.

14. SLR attributes

15. Questions from the design process • What is more important, habitat or age? • How to account for differences in TEM and SSS? • What is the impact to timber supply at the LU or operational scale? • What is the best tool to use for the HWB analysis?