Canadian Forest Service research projects

Read about the scientific research projects underway at the Canadian Forest Service.

Forests in Canada

• General information

  • Effect of site preparation on the maintenance of soil productivity: paludification, degraded mixed forests, ligniculture
  • Environmental chemistry and ecotoxicology
  • Research on productivity in natural stands and fast-growing plantations and development of growth models and process-based models
  • Risks of windthrow associated with the implementation of partial harvest strategies in softwood forests
  • Environmental Science Advisory Committee
  • Montane Alternative Silvicultural Systems (MASS)

• Forest ecosystem products and services

  • Resilience of soil carbon reservoirs in eastern Canada's forests
  • Long-term effects of forest harvesting on soil fertility and forest productivity
  • Forest hydrology - Great Lakes/St. Lawrence region
  • Identification of exotic fungi introduced into Canada
  • Forest soils of Ontario - Soil monolith collection at GLFC
  • British Columbia Ectomycorrhizal Research Network

• Classification

  • Inventory and management tools
  • Topographic Models: Development and Applications
  • Towards a forest inventory that can predict the properties and economic value of forest wood: Tree scale
  • Levels-of-Growing-Stock Study (LOGS)

• Sustainable forest management

  • Decision support tools: Dynamic models
  • Peatland black spruce
  • Jack pine ecosystem productivity project
  • Coastal forest chronosequences project
  • Optimization of partial harvest strategies and practices: application to uneven-aged hardwood managment
  • Forest regeneration assessment techniques

Climate change

• General information

  • Regional, national and international climate modeling
  • Dead organic matter calibration
  • Uncertainty and sensitivity analysis
  • Characterization and regionalization of disturbance regimes affecting Canadian forests
  • Climate warming and pitch pine
  • Factors controlling carbon and nutrient cycling according to the climatic and vegetation gradients of the ECOLEAP sites
  • Forest productivity modelling
  • Canadian intersite decomposition experiment (CIDET)
  • High-resolution maps of climate and climate change
  • Integrating tree-ring and sample plot data to reconstruct annual estimates of ecosystem productivity
  • Climate impacts on productivity and health of aspen
  • Ecosystem consequences of spruce budworm outbreaks under a changing climate
  • Management of the hemlock looper (HL) in a changing environment

• Carbon accounting

  • Uncertainty estimation for Canada’s National Forest Carbon Monitoring, Accounting, and Reporting System

• Forest carbon

  • Forest sector climate change mitigation
  • Forest carbon dynamics

• Impacts

  • Forest tree species and the impact of climate change and variability

• Adaptation

  • Mixing seed sources for assisted migration and population fitness

Fire

• General information

  • Fire regimes in eastern Canada: past, present and future
  • Post-disturbance forest dynamics on the North Shore of Quebec
  • Reconstruction of natural fire regimes

• Fire ecology

  • Post-fire dynamics in the boreal forest
  • Biomass production and fire regimes

• Protecting communities

  • Human dimensions of fire management at the wildland urban interface

Industry

• General information

  • Mass clonal (vegetative) propagation and genetic modification of forest trees through somatic embryogenesis
  • Genetics of conifers
  • Research on the potential environmental impact of genetically modified trees
  • Genomics of tree-microbe interactions
  • Environmental genomics
  • Structural and functional genomics
  • Rejuvenation of adult white spruce (Picea glauca) through somatic embryogenesis
  • Towards an improved assessment of the risks associated with the dispersion of new genes into the environment
  • Pioneering a new breed of forests
  • Genomics of tree adaptation
  • Forest genomics and molecular breeding
  • Genomics of defoliating insects

• Biomass, bioenergy and bioproducts

  • Development and validation of indicators of site sensitivity to biomass harvesting
  • Mapping of soil fertility and site sensitivity to forest biomass harvesting on a Quebec and Canadian scale
  • Key barriers and issues to the extensive deployment of short-rotation plantation and agroforestry energy systems in Canada
  • Impacts of intensive forest biomass harvesting on biodiversity of litter Coleoptera
  • AshNet

Insects and diseases

• General information

  • Cytochemical characterization of infection and resistance mechanisms in various host-pest relationships
  • Help to improve Canada’s evaluation of the phytosanitary risks related to sudden oak death
  • Bark and terminal weevils of the genus *Pissodes*
  • Chemical ecology, behaviour and management of Dendroctonus spp.
  • Hymenopterous wasps, especially the braconidae
  • Insect biodiversity and identification
  • Silvicultural control of diseases
  • Preventive biological control of Heterobasidion annosum
  • Epidemiology of pathogenic fungi
  • Biodiversity and taxonomy of pathogenic fungi
  • White pine weevil management
  • Screening spruce for white pine weevil resistance
  • Microbial control agents project
  • Genomic-enabled forest pathogen detection
  • Management of the hemlock looper (HL) in a changing environment

• Brown spruce longhorn beetle

  • Community ecology of the brown spruce longhorn beetle, _Tetropium fuscum_ Fabr., in Nova Scotia
  • Enzymes of the juvenile hormone biosynthetic pathway

• Mountain pine beetle

  • Modelling of the dynamics of forest insect populations
  • Stand development following mountain pine beetle outbreaks in south-central British Columbia

• Spruce budworm

  • Modelling of the dynamics of forest insect populations
  • Dynamics of rising spruce budworm populations
  • Enzymes of the juvenile hormone biosynthetic pathway
  • Disruption of lepidopteran development by polydnaviruses
  • Spruce budworm and sustainable management of the boreal forest
  • Ecosystem consequences of spruce budworm outbreaks under a changing climate

• Economic impacts

  • Protecting market access for Canadian softwood using molecular diagnostic tools

• Forest ecosystem impacts

  • EcoDIF - Ecology of species
  • EcoDIF - Ecology of communities

• Risk-based decision making

  • Exotic species risk modelling
  • BioSIM

Remote sensing

• General information

  • EVC - Evaluation and Validation of CHRIS for National Forests
  • EVEOSD - Evaluation and Validation of EO-1 for Sustainable Development
  • Advanced Forest Technologies

• High spatial resolution image analysis

  • Individual tree crown (ITC) techniques
  • ITC analysis of satellite images
  • ITC analysis of aerial images