A forest, like any garden, will grow to the limits of available light, soil nutrients and water if left untended. It will support a variety of plants, seeding-in from plants on the site as well as from seeds carried by wind or dropped by birds and animals. It will grow without discriminating between crops.

By managing, or cultivating, the forest you can choose the dominant crops it produces, creating and maintaining the overall forest environment your community wants. This is silviculture (from the Latin words "silva" meaning wood or forest, and "cultura" meaning cultivation).

Your community's objectives in forest cultivation might be to:

• manage all the resources _ _ plant, animal, fish, water and soil _ _ to achieve a balanced, holistic environment;
• create openings for forage production and grazing;
• improve access to certain areas for recreation and wildlife;
• enhance spiritual and aesthetic values;
• reduce losses caused by insects, disease and fire;
• reduce the loss of trees that die from competition for light, space or nutrients;
• encourage the growth rate of the trees to increase the number of harvests;
• control the density and mix of trees to improve timber productivity;
• control the species and mix of trees to improve wildlife habitat; and
• protect watersheds, stream banks and fish habitats.

Cultivating a large area of forest is complicated. Shaping your forest to match your community goals takes careful planning and includes many steps:

• setting goals;
• identifying several options for achieving them;
• selecting the preferred option;
• developing a set of actions _ _ your operational plan _ _ to carry out this option; and
• monitoring the plan to make sure that, as time passes, the actions and goals continue to be appropriate, or changing it if necessary.

This last point is really important: forest management plans must keep pace with a living, changing entity _ _ the forest itself _ _ and with an evolving community, changing market conditions, and new scientific information and silvicultural methods. Your plan, therefore, must be reviewed periodically and modified when appropriate to keep it up-to-date and in harmony with your changing goals.

Advantages of a Formal, Written Forest Management Plan

A formal, written forest management plan clarifies the benefits you want from your woodland, identifies ways of achieving them and helps select the benefits preferred by your First Nation. Developing a written plan needs a qualified professional.

Good forestry practice requires that a management plan address "integrated resource management." That means the plan must give appropriate consideration to wildlife, recreation, watersheds, fish, timber, etc. The plan, therefore, must take account of how the management of each resource affects the others, and lay down specific guidelines for timber harvesting to safeguard the non-timber resources. It must define compatible activities that may be conducted in the same area simultaneously, and incompatible operations that can only take place in the same area at different times.

In drawing up the plan, a professional forester divides the woodland into separate management units. The division is based on each area's characteristics and, consequently, an area of similar trees, soil and terrain would be treated as one management unit.

You can have separate development objectives for each unit. For one, it may be the protection of sacred sites and medicinal plants; for another, it could be the improvement of wildlife habitat for trapping, or development of camp sites, or it could be road building to an area soon to be harvested, treated for disease or reforested after a fire. One First Nation's unique objective is to use a management unit as an outdoor classroom where school children study the forest ecosystem in a "living laboratory."

Planning to Manage the Forest for Non-Timber Resources ²

First Nations have great flexibility when choosing their management objectives and are not limited to timber harvesting. This is why they commission a global inventory of the trees and all of the non-timber resources as well. This global inventory identifies the location of each resource so that each and every one may be preserved. Then, any one resource (or several of them) can be developed, either for its cultural importance to the First Nation or as a business venture.

Visualizing Multiple Land Uses

Preparing a series of maps, one for each resource, is an effective way of building a picture of the full potential of your forest. By drawing each map on acetate, see-through paper, and laying one transparent sheet over another, you can see possible conflicting uses right away and plan accordingly. As new information is collected, it can be added to the maps.

² Management for timber resources is discussed in the chapter entitled "Harvesting, the Environment and Integrated Resource Management."

Planning Recreation

When deciding which area of the forest to reserve for recreational activities, consider the lay of the land, its watersheds, plant and animal life, delicate soils and any cultural sites that need protecting. The extent and style of any development is up to you. For example, you may want to build trails, viewing platforms or blinds for wildlife, or you may want to use other areas for camp sites to rent out. Whatever your choice, the preservation of the cultural and recreational areas of your forest depends on keeping them separate from the traffic, noise and view of logging or silvicultural activities.

Enhancing the Wildlife Habitat

Wildlife management is largely habitat management. Many Aboriginal communities are well equipped for the task because they understand the food, water and shelter needs of different animals and know how to modify habitats to provide for these needs. For example, if deer are short of forage, you might stimulate the growth of browse vegetation by prescribed burning or by trimming back certain trees to let more light into the woods. The method chosen would be specified in the forest management plan, because it is important to decide ahead of time how to encourage reproduction in particular wildlife species or to lure back some that have disappeared.

Developing Range and Agro-Forestry

The practice of cultivating forage crops along with a stand of trees is called agro-forestry. If the trees and the farm crop are planted side by side, the trees shelter the agricultural crop. Alternatively, the forage crop can be planted under the trees _ _ as in parts of British Columbia where livestock graze in the shade of Douglas fir and pine. Grazing domestic livestock on forage crops is an important forest land use. By adopting specific range and forest management practices you can provide the forage and fences required to raise cattle in distinct management units of your woodland, separate from units where wildlife habitat is protected.

Forage crops are often sown on woodlands that have been either clear-cut or devastated by fire. Good quality forage is also produced in areas where controlled burning, selection cutting, thinning or pruning has opened dense stands for grazing. You can direct the forester to specify in your plan which of these activities would be appropriate for your woodlands to develop agro-forestry.

Agro-forestry works well in intensive small-scale operations, suitable to the size of many reserves. In one management unit you can plant fast-growing crops (such as Christmas trees, berry bushes, seedlings) next to, or under, slow _ _ maturing trees that are being grown for saw logs. In another unit you can harvest wild crops every year reeds and greens for ornaments and wreaths, flowers, medicinal plants, fiddleheads, mushrooms, edible roots and herbs. In the open woodland unit you can raise pigs and chickens. You could even try fish farming, now that trout are being pond-reared successfully in some woodland streams.

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