3 Additional Components of the Reviews

The engagement described in section 2 includes consideration of applicable scientific investigations, monitoring programs, and advances in technology as part of the feedback received from workshop participants. Full incorporation of landscape guide direction in the recent round of forest management planning meant that a focus of this review was to solicit feedback on implementing guide direction. However, there were additional considerations that warranted inclusion in these reviews. This section of the report provides a brief overview of provincial reporting and audit findings; current science, research and monitoring programs; and advances in technology relevant to the landscape guides.

3.1 Reporting and audits

A review of forest management plans and their annual reports concluded that the landscape guides are generally being applied as intended. However, there appears to be variation in the interpretation of some direction, and therefore differences in its application. For example, some landscape guide indicators are directed to be applied in appropriate forest type groupings (e.g., old growth indicator). Application of old growth indicators varied across regions, where each forest unit was maintained separately in the south, groupings of certain forest units identified in the northwest, and all forest units grouped in the northeast. Similarly, there appeared to be a lot of variation in the approach to identifying large landscape patches and associated objectives, particularly in the context of the texture of mature and old forest (see Natural Resources Information Portal).

Provincial level reporting for some landscape guide indicators is available on the Ontario webpage, though with limited measurements through time. The Forest Resources of Ontario 2021 report included summaries of landscape class area by landscape guide region, which can be compared to SRNVs. As part of this investigation, the forest composition and silviculture practices for the Spanish forest were also reviewed. The Spanish Forest is currently part of the GLSL landscape guide regions, and the management unit mostly overlaps with ecoregion 4E. The majority of the Spanish Forest is managed with silviculture systems (i.e., clearcut) consistent with practices in the boreal forest. Ontario’s Forest Facts webpage identifies Spanish Forest having 63,000ha of red and white pine forest (6% of the forest), and 1,322ha of tolerant hardwood forest (0.1% of the forest). Generally, less than 100ha per year are harvested under a shelterwood/partial harvest system. Therefore, these data appear to support the recommendations for the Spanish Forest to be managed following the Boreal Landscape Guide instead of the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence Landscape Guide.

Another source of information for reviewing a forest management guide is the Independent Forest Audits (IFAs). In general, few IFA findings directly relate to the landscape guides. Most of the relevant IFA findings are related to caribou, including recommendations for the MNR to complete a range management plan for the Lake Superior Coast Range and a habitat management strategy for the Discontinuous Distribution. There were also comments about silviculture practices and their support for the renewal of caribou habitat, rehabilitation of roads, and a concern that a lack of harvest could negatively affect the renewal of habitat. One recommendation from an IFA was for MNR to provide direction for DCHS block closure requirements in the DCHS blocks where harvest was deemed complete. This resulted in several forest management plans in the northwest region adopting a template to report on the status of harvest activities and caribou habitat for these areas, and this documentation helped to fulfill the documentation for large landscape patches that is required by the landscape guide.

3.2 Scientific investigations, research, and monitoring programs

The Ministry has an extensive history of science, research, and monitoring, including monitoring the effects of forest operations and the effectiveness of forest management guides in mitigating effects. Currently, Ministry research priorities are guided by two strategic science initiatives: the Integrated Science Action Plan (ISAP) and the Integrated Monitoring Framework (IMF). The monitoring activities documented in the IMF inform guide direction by assessing the effects of ecological and environmental changes on forest resources and the impacts and effects of management actions. ISAP objectives include:

Collect information about the state of wildlife species to inform and evaluate wildlife policies including:
- Monitoring landscape scale populations of cervid species (Objective 4a)
- Inventorying the distribution and diversity of wildlife species as an indicator of the state of crown forest biodiversity and terrestrial habitats and ecosystems (Objective 4d)
Acquire knowledge about forested landscapes, ecosystems, and associated species including conducting research to understand:
- Effects of natural disturbance emulation, natural and anthropogenic post-disturbance ecology and succession on terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems, landscape processes, and cumulative impacts (Objective 8a)
Acquire knowledge about wildlife species and their habitat by conducting research on game and furbearing species to address critical knowledge gaps (Objective 9a)

The landscape guides acknowledge that forested landscapes are part of a natural adaptive cycle (Gunderson and Holling 2002). Holling (2001) described sustainable management as a “logical partnership” with “the goal of fostering adaptive capabilities and creating opportunities” (Holling 2001) . Ontario’s forest policy and sustainable management framework were designed around principles of adaptive management, which are widely applied in North America (Powell 2021, Stankey et al. 2005, Bormann et al 1999, Baker 2000). An adaptive management approach links science and policy by treating policy as a hypothesis to efficiently promote continuous learning and to improve management practices.

The science behind the landscape guides and associated indicator system is generally supported by current literature (Rempel et al. 2016, Gauthier et al. 2009, Lindenmayer and Franklin 2002, Lindenmayer et al. 2000) and consistent with forest management approaches across boreal Canada. In British Columbia, the Interim Assessment Protocol for Forest Biodiversity in British Columbia (2020) is the current framework that includes a series of biodiversity indicators and associated rating system. Forest policy in Alberta (Ministry of Forestry and Parks 2025), Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and Québec generally require forest management plans to include a values, objectives and indicator table consistent with the Canadian Council of Forest Ministers (CCFM) Criteria and Indicators (Bridge et al. 2005) and Montréal Process framework. The Montréal Process committed member countries to implementing criteria and indicators that are science-based and inform progress in achieving sustainable forest management. The common basis for approaches across Canada is maintaining biodiversity through the emulation of natural disturbances and landscape patterns with an ecological indicator system. A key difference is that Ontario’s direction and supporting science and information is relatively transparent, publicly accessible, and generally more detailed especially in attempts to address forest patterns and processes.

Ontario’s forest management guides are supported by a strategy for monitoring and assessing the effectiveness of guide direction related to the emulation of natural disturbances and landscape pattern. Guide effectiveness monitoring includes programs and projects internal and external to the MNR. Collectively, this work is reviewed to identify how critical uncertainties were addressed, as described in the Effectiveness Monitoring of Forest Management Guides Strategic Direction (Rempel et al 2011). One of the key uncertainties is if the coarse filter in combination with the fine filter (including direction from other guides) produces a pattern of harvested and residual forest at stand and multi-stand scales that supports wildlife communities similar to those found in habitats disturbed by natural events.

Birds are believed to be an effective indicator of potential changes in habitat function between forests of natural and managed disturbance origin (Rempel et al 2016, Brown et al 2021). This theory appears to be generally supported by recent literature, with relatively few exceptions. Wyshynski and Nudds (2009) found no evidence of different patterns of variations in songbird and woodpecker diversity between managed and natural boreal forest landscapes in northwestern Ontario, and found species richness among forest types at the stand level varied more than between landscapes. Bӧrger and Nudds (2014) found that waterbird response to fire and harvesting were similar for 13 of the 14 most common species between 10-20 years post-disturbance, but up to 30 species may experience altered distribution dynamics in the short-term. Similarly, Rempel et al (2016) found that most forest bird species (11 of 14) occurred with equal occupancy rates in habitat originating from natural and harvesting disturbances in Ontario and that differences in quantity and/or quality of specific habitat types and/or features (e.g., standing residual trees) likely explain the variable responses. Zimmerling et al (2017) reported that more than half of 62 boreal forest bird species responded similarly to disturbances by fire and harvesting. However, they also observed differences in early (0-20 years) and mid-successional (21-80 years) stands, where species richness and abundance was lower in post-harvest compared to post-fire stands. Zlonis and Niemi (2014) found that unmanaged stands (i.e., older, mixed, and more structurally diverse) provided habitat for an increased abundance and richness of bird communities compared to managed stands, however, most early successional species did not differ between the two disturbance types. Bognounou et al. (2021) found salvage logging after fire had lower taxonomic and functional diversity than areas of fire-origin or resulting from forest management.

A current project to evaluate the effectiveness of landscape guide direction is focused on validating landscape classes using available wildlife monitoring data. In this project, MNR is modeling wildlife habitat for a set of wildlife species using available Multiple Species Inventory and Monitoring (MSIM) and Ontario Wildlife Monitoring Network (OWMN) data and relating these models to existing landscape classes. Wildlife observation data are being used to summarize habitat using regression and occupancy estimation. The project focuses on wildlife species with adequate data and will summarise the strength of support for landscape classes (Martin et al 2025). The project also intends to explore wildlife species responses to forest conditions based on other metrics (e.g., tree composition, stand age, Normalized Difference Vegetation Index) and use cluster or ordination analyses to identify major axes or groupings that capture large amounts of variation in forest wildlife habitat. Overall, this work is expected to inform whether the landscape classes are being used by wildlife as expected and may result in recommendations for different groups of forest type and structure that are meaningful to wildlife.

Another critical uncertainty associated with the BLG(Rempel et al 2011) is if the direction for caribou in the guide creates habitat that contributes to sustaining viable populations of caribou. This uncertainty closely aligns with priorities identified in the Caribou Conservation Agreement. Conservation Measure 3.1 (Forest Management Planning) focuses on supporting the implementation and assessing the effectiveness of caribou-related direction in the BLG in supporting self-sustaining caribou populations. There are six projects that are currently supporting the objectives of this conservation measure:

Re-estimation of the Simulated Ranges of Natural Variation in the Boreal Landscape Guide Regions
Evaluating caribou habitat definitions used in Ontario’s forest management:
Application of a spatially explicit Population Viability Analysis model to simulated landscapes.
Evaluating the effectiveness of caribou calving and nursery area direction
Re-estimating cumulative disturbance in caribou ranges overlapping the managed forest.
Assessment of caribou habitat connectivity measures

Recently, a report related to the connectivity project under Conservation Measure 3.1 concluded that Ontario was the Canadian jurisdiction with the most explicit strategy to measure, monitor and forecast changes in caribou habitat connectivity over time (Wilson 2025a). Caribou habitat management across Canada commonly involves zoning with varying degrees of associated regulation. Results from this project, the other Conservation Measure 3.1 projects listed above, and work from other Conservation Measures are expected to support potential guide revisions in the long-term

The Boreal SRNV Project is another example where updated science, information, and technology are informing landscape guide implementation. In this project, the forest succession rule inputs were informed by the findings of Lennon et al (2016, 2016b). The platform used to run the model is LANDIS-II, which has many academic users. This project supported programming changes to ensure compatibility of model extensions. The project relies on powerful virtual machines to complete the analysis, which were not available when the SRNVs were originally estimated.

There is emerging science related to managing forests in the context of climate change. Messier et al (2019) tested a functional complex network to manage forests for resilience to climate and disturbances by combining functional species trait information with network theory. The “DIVERSE” project is a Canadian research initiative supported by MNR and designed to inform forest management through research about the application of functional diversity and ecological connectivity concepts (e.g., complex function networks). The project seeks to enhance forest resiliency to global changes while fostering sustainable forest stewardship (Messier et al 2019). The compatibility of this work with the concept of emulating natural disturbances and landscape patterns is unknown. The research is focused on management actions that increase alpha level diversity, and the consideration of different scales of diversity is unclear.

3.3 Advances in technology and changes to operational practices

Overall, there were recommendations in the workshops to update the science and information packages and Ontario’s Landscape Tool (OLT) using modernized platforms. There was an appreciation for the amount of information available in the packages and OLT, but some of the embedded files cannot be opened in browsers and required the package to be downloaded. Continued maintenance and updates to the science and tools supporting the landscape guides is critical to effective and efficient implementation of guide direction.

The engagement session included suggestions to use Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) data and spatial models to implement landscape guide direction in forest management plans. LiDAR may be able to inform road conditions on the management unit, classify disturbance, identify old growth, and better define stand structure. This more detailed information on stand structure could be particularly useful in the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence, given that age is not a good measure of structure in these forests. Having a more reliable measure of structure at the landscape scale could provide opportunities to improve landscape guide direction. This information may be able to be incorporated into future estimates of the SRNV, with potential challenges created by the extent of data coverage. Novel ways to incorporate disparate datasets may need to be explored.

Pilot testing during the development of the landscape guide was conducted using a spatial forest estate model called Patchworks. Approximately half of the survey respondents indicated they used a spatial model in their forest management plan. With the growing use of spatial models and new requirements in the Forest Management Planning Manual (2024), it is logical to assess texture and pattern indicators identified in the landscape guide beyond plan start and plan end. Many planning teams are already running these types of assessments with and without spatial models. The use of a spatial model could help to address the concerns heard during the engagement sessions about challenges in implementing and improving the achievement of texture and patch size indicators.