Introduction

An understanding of the ecological workings of British Columbia's Forests is essential to ensuring a renewable resource well into the future. With a rapidly increasing global population and the industrialization of the less developed countries of the world, a greater demand for the exportation of Canadian and primarily British Columbia's lumber, has emerged. As a result, British Columbia's forest practices have come into question by many concerned individuals living in the more developed nations.

Previous research and beliefs have shaped the way in which we carry out our forest practices today, and many of these practices have been implemented as law. However, these laws and current practices need continual feedback and input with regards to the practicality and the long-term impacts of these current-logging practices.

This particular research was funded by the Ministry of Forests (MOF), Forest Renewal British Columbia (FRBC), Simon Fraser University (SFU), and Riverside Forest Products and is intended to be part of a large, interdisciplinary research project, which would study the ecology of high elevation forests at Sicamous Creek in the southern interior of British Columbia. The research at hand addresses the question of whether or not there is an edge effect in forest floor chemical and physical properties across edges of high elevation clear-cuts in the southern interior of British Columbia (Redding, 2000).

Background

Recently there has been increasing public objection to the traditional methods for clear-cut harvesting based on the grounds that it may negatively affect values such as wildlife, aesthetics and recreation. Silvicultural systems utilizing smaller cut-blocks rather than larger cut-blocks have been proposed as a more appropriate method of forest harvesting that would hopefully protect environmental values (Franklin and Forman, 1987).

Clear-cut harvesting creates edges between an anthropogenic clearing in the ecosystem and the natural ecosystem and although these edges may appear to cause an abrupt transition, these adjacent ecosystems may influence each other (Redding, 2000). The influences both of these side by side ecosystems have upon one another is referred to as an edge effect. Because smaller openings actually have a larger length of edge per unit area harvested than would the larger openings, it is now believed that the small cut-blocks will have a greater potential to influence edge effects (Franklin and Forman, 1987).

A considerable amount of research has been carried out regarding edge effects for variables such as microclimate and vegetation. Most of these studies concentrated on the edge effects into the remaining forest in order to determine whether or not there is habitat degradation resulting from the adjacent edge.