Summary of 2024 Landscape Guide Reviews (Boreal and Great Lakes-St. Lawrence)

Published

June 26, 2025

Executive Summary

Image of landscape guide cover pages.

This report presents the findings and conclusions of the ten-year reviews of the Forest Management Guide for Boreal Landscapes and the Forest Management Guide for Great Lakes - St. Lawrence Landscapes. The reviews resulted in a recommendation to proceed with a scoped revision to modernize both the Boreal Landscape Guide and Great Lakes-St. Lawrence Landscape Guide. Short-term revision recommendations are focused on modernizing, clarifying and improving consistency of direction, without significant changes that would affect implementation.

The reviews included consideration of the results of applicable scientific investigations and monitoring programs, feedback from practitioners, Indigenous peoples, and stakeholders, as well as advances in technology and changes to operational practices. A series of information sessions, workshops and a survey engaged approximately 200 participants in the landscape guide reviews. Feedback was received from industry and MNR practitioners, First Nation communities and organizations, Métis communities and organizations, and stakeholders. Details of this engagement are provided in section 2, and the key themes of discussion included:

  • Importance of communication (training, plain language)

  • Inclusion of Indigenous Knowledge

  • Concerns about Effectiveness Monitoring

  • Climate Change, Cumulative Effects, Caribou

  • Simulated Ranges of Natural Variation (SRNV)

Specific recommendations were grouped into general recommendations that do not require guide revisions, short-term recommendations for the Boreal Landscape Guide, short-term recommendations for the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence Landscape Guide, and long-term recommendations for both landscape guides.

General recommendations:

  1. Continue to deliver and improve training materials related to the landscape guide and supporting science and tools.

  2. Develop communication materials to explain the landscape guides to a public audience.

  3. Continue to update the science and maintain the tools supporting implementation of the landscape guides.

  4. Continue to support and improve effectiveness monitoring efforts to address key uncertainties related to landscape guide direction.

Short-term revision recommendation for the Boreal Landscape Guide:

  1. Incorporate the Spanish Forest into the Boreal Landscape Guide, as part of Landscape Guide Region 3E.

  2. Align texture and patch size indicator timing of assessment with recent changes to the Forest Management Planning Manual.

  3. Administrative updates to outdated references (e.g., policies, legislation)

  4. Update references to science and information packages:

  • to align with outcomes of Boreal Simulated Ranges of Natural Variation Project, and

  • to clarify landscape guide application where there is disagreement between the guide and science packages.

Short-term revision recommendation to modernize the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence Landscape Guide:

Remove the Spanish Forest from the GLSL North Landscape Guide Region

Align texture and patch size indicator timing of assessment with recent changes in the Forest Management Planning Manual

Administrative updates to outdated references (e.g., policies, legislation).

Include direction regarding favouring non-landscape guide indicator achievement to the GLSL Landscape guide, consistent with Boreal Landscape Guide direction.

Clarify landscape guide forest unit assignments to landscape classes.

Long-term recommendations:

  1. Collaborate on ways the landscape guide could be co-applied with Indigenous Knowledge and explore opportunities to enable this in the guide.

  2. Identify options for the landscape guides to provide direction to planning teams regarding climate change at the landscape scale.

  3. Identify options for the landscape guides to provide direction to planning teams regarding cumulative effects at the landscape scale.

  4. Identify updates to caribou-related direction (Boreal Landscape Guide), consistent with results from Canada-Ontario Caribou Conservation Agreement

  5. Continue to practice adaptive management and consider revisions where new science and information are available (e.g., results of effectiveness monitoring programs and projects)