BENCHMARKING HEALTHY ECOSYSTEMS
by Dr. Fiona K.A. Schmiegelow

Canada is blessed with abundant forest resources. Forests form the fabric of our economy and their direct and indirect benefits support communities across the country. As a nation, we rely on the health of forest ecosystems to sustain many of the values that shape our concept of what Canada is. Globally, Canada’s forests represent some of the last fully-functioning ecosystems, harbouring healthy wildlife populations and driven largely by natural processes. These systems have ecological integrity. In contrast, human activities in many other parts of the world have profoundly altered natural systems, resulting in increases in numbers of threatened and endangered wildlife species, reductions in air and water quality, and a loss of ecological integrity. Effects on socio-economic systems have also been significant.

As forests in Canada enter a period of unprecedented change, they face many challenges. Accelerating demands on forest resources, along with altered climate regimes and ancillary effects on natural disturbances such as wildfire and insect outbreaks, place increasing pressure on these ecosystems. They also compound uncertainties regarding the ability of forest management strategies to achieve their goals. Can we, in the face of these challenges, identify strategies to sustain the values these systems support? The short answer to this question is yes, and the solution involves benchmarking. 

If we assume that the goal of sustainable forest management is to maintain the integrity of forested ecosystems and the socio-economic systems they support, and we accept the premise that natural ecosystems support a high level of ecological integrity, we can then frame the problem as one of determining how much resource development can be supported by natural ecosystems without compromising ecological integrity. This is a distinctly different approach from historic resource allocation strategies that typically maximized a single resource in the absence of other considerations. This also presents an opportunity to recognize and address uncertainties in decision-making processes that influence the sustainability of management activities. So, what is the link between issues of sustainability, management strategies, and benchmarking of forest ecosystems?

In highly altered landscapes, we have clearly exceeded the capacity of natural systems to absorb the changes associated with certain activities, resulting in a loss of integrity and associated values. At the other end of the spectrum, we recognize that intact systems have high natural integrity. The domain of sustainability lies in between. Because we are uncertain of the bounds, we need a framework to guide the evaluation of management strategies. The process of adaptive management is a powerful tool to address uncertainties and identify sustainable land management strategies. Adaptive management requires a structured and systematic approach to reduce the risk of undesirable outcomes, particularly those that foreclose future options, while recognizing the need to support local economies and communities through resource management activities. Adaptive management further recognizes the uncertainty inherent to resource management, and treats management activities as experiments that are carefully designed, rigorously monitored, and adjusted as additional information becomes available. A series of contributed articles on regional applications of adaptive management in Canada appears in recent and upcoming issues of Canadian Silviculture. The focus here is on components related to benchmarking.

A fundamental tenet of experiments is that they require controls. Controls are references against which something can be measured or judged; a standard for comparison. Medical trials routinely assign a treatment to one group while monitoring another for behaviour in the absence of intervention. In the context of resource management, controls are necessary to distinguish the effects of natural variation within a resource use area from the effects of changes induced by development activities. In the absence of such controls, we could fail to detect important changes in systems related to development activities; for example, if they are masked by natural fluctuations. Conversely, we could wrongly attribute natural variations to development activities. Benchmarking natural ecosystems can provide the necessary controls for resource management experiments, and the foundation for identifying sustainable activities.
The general proposition of establishing ecological benchmarks is largely intuitive. However, identifying the attributes necessary to facilitate meaningful comparisons is critical to their relevance. Ecosystem-level benchmarks should be ecologically intact areas, representative of natural environmental variation, including vegetation communities and productivity gradients, and sufficiently large to maintain key ecological processes and support natural ecosystem dynamics. In addition to serving as controls for development activities, they play an important role as ecological baselines to increase our knowledge of the forest ecosystems. Benchmarks can also act as anchors of a protected area’s network and contribute to the resilience of the larger system to climate change. Existing protected areas may be candidates for ecological benchmarks, but most were not established with this role in mind. As a result, many protected areas are either too small, or do not represent natural variation sufficiently to serve as ecosystem-level benchmarks. For example, many of the largest parks in Canada contribute little to benchmarking of forest ecosystems, because they are largely comprised of mountain systems and other natural features selected for their scenic value. Establishment of forest ecosystem benchmarks is an ambitious goal, but one that could be achieved in Canada, particularly in boreal regions. 

Earlier I mentioned the significance of natural processes in continuing to shape the forests of Canada. We can also think of these as flows - of nutrients, water, wildlife, wildfire, among other things. These flows connect systems and provide resilience to change across many scales. In the medical field, health is commonly defined as an organism’s ability to efficiently respond to challenges (stressors) and effectively restore and sustain a “state of balance”. Ecosystem health could be similarly defined, with the important qualifier that balance does not imply a static condition, at least not over the scales at which we tend to think. A given forest stand could change in age structure and composition, due to succession or natural disturbance; perhaps even transition to a non-forested site, and still be a component of a healthy forest ecosystem. 

Forests are dynamic, in both space and time, and understanding the contribution of these dynamics to the resilience of the system is what benchmarking permits. As the scale of human activities expands to the scale of ecosystems, and as we experience increasing effects of climate change, establishing references is critical to identifying effective management strategies. This involves benchmarking forest ecosystems now to establish a baseline for future comparisons, and over time, to assess relative change under different management regimes. This requires the commitment of many parties to a long-term process of learning.
Over the past decade, the concept of benchmarking has gained considerable traction in corporate circles as a method to increase efficiency and effectiveness of business operations, particularly in dynamic economic climates. Like benchmarking for ecological sustainability, successful corporate benchmarking requires careful attention to the relevance of data comparisons. Business applications require that a rigorous process be applied to benchmarking to enable meaningful comparisons and enhance understanding of why certain actions result in better performance. Performance is measured by efficiency (doing things right) and effectiveness (doing the right thing). Global leaders achieve high scores in both areas. While there is no single formula for success, analyses have revealed that world-class business leaders recognize that benchmarking to improve performance is a journey, not an event. 

Canada has an unparalleled opportunity to be a global leader in sustainable forest management. An important element in realizing success is benchmarking of forest ecosystems. With more intact forest than any other country in the world, the condition and extent of our forests allow benchmarking at a scale unimaginable in other jurisdictions. Our stable political system and strong economy provide a foundation for long-term planning. Innovative partners in industry, an informed non-government environmental constituency, and emerging aboriginal governance structures can enable implementation. 

Too often, we spend most of our energy examining what is probable, given past trajectories, rather than exploring what is possible, given vision and commitment. Uncertainty rests not with the projected outcome of conventional approaches to forest management, but in the efficacy of alternative approaches to achieving a broader set of objectives. This is where the opportunities for innovation lie. 

Dr. Fiona Schmiegelow is an Associate Professor of Landscape Ecology and Conservation Science in the Department of Renewable Resources, University of Alberta, and a Research Scientist in the Wildlife and Landscape Science Division of Environment Canada.