From our Director:
Welcome to the April edition of our ARC Training Centre for Forest Value Newsletter in 2022.
The first quarter of the year has seen the Centre for Forest Value finalise some exciting work and start some new projects across a range of fields.
In this edition, I’m pleased to share details of seven new PhD projects. Six projects are supported by Forest and Wood Products Australia (FWPA) forest grower members and encompass a range of topics including forest management, tree genetics, browsing management, and plantation productivity. Additionally, a new PhD project on deer management is underway in Victoria in collaboration with FWPA, Hancock Victorian Plantations, University of Sydney and funded through the NIFPI Gippsland Centre.
This was an exciting period for new publications with the release of Restoring the Midlands, a special issue of the journal Ecological Management and Restoration. This issue brought together a multidisciplinary, multi-institutional, science-based approach to environmental restoration representing over a decade of research across 1800 hectares of land. A field workshop covering outcomes for landowners will be held at Connorville on 26th May, details are below.
Finally, in November last year, we celebrated the achievements of the six years of excellence of the ARC Industrial Training Centre for Forest Value in an event that brought together staff, colleagues, former and present students, and representatives of organisations across the forestry supply chain.
I hope you enjoy reading about the Centre’s research in this edition of the newsletter and I look forward to bringing you additional updates throughout the year.
Associate Professor Julianne O’Reilly-Wapstra, Director ARC Training Centre for Forest Value
Keep up-to-date with Centre outputs and news via our website and follow us on Twitter.
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Finding innovative solutions to challenges continues through six new PhD projects
Forest and Wood Products Australia’s (FWPA) forest grower members help coordinate the research priorities and involvement of Australia’s major forest growers. Recently FWPA has partnered with the Centre to fund six new PhD projects focusing on a range of areas that aim to help improve forest growth, productivity, and management now and into the future.
The program of work will be supported by a technical officer and a range of forest organisations to ensure integration across the projects. Centre Director Julianne O’Reilly-Wapstra commented, "it is exciting that we are able to work with our industry partners to examine challenges and find solutions through a range of new PhD projects across genetics, plantation silviculture and productivity, and browsing management."
The new projects are:
Project One: Quantifying risks and the scale of mammal browsing to inform technological solutions. This project aims to gain an accurate understanding of the browsing risk to plantations and native forest regeneration sites. The project will investigate a novel and cost-effective monitoring and deterrent tool. Outcomes of this project include reducing costs for on-ground mammal browsing monitoring and control and providing cost-effective and socially acceptable management strategies while reducing OH&S risk.
Project Two: Maximising and maintaining site productivity will investigate the determining factors and drivers of site productivity. This project looks at large-scale geographical environmental variation, site-specific factors, and site management factors (e.g. herbicides, fertilisers) in hardwood plantations. The project will investigate the quantification of the relationship between nutrients, water, and above and belowground processes.
Projects Three & Four: Contemporary and future risk traits in eucalypt forests and models for including novel traits in future forests will focus on traits affecting resistance to drought, heat, diseases, and pests in two major hardwood plantation species, E. nitens, and E. globulus, to complement tools in the breeding of material to minimise threats. This will help to ensure a productive future forest estate under a changing climate.
Project Five: Biotic agents and silvicultural practices: combined management approaches to maximise tree survival in hardwood plantations will investigate the drivers of poor survival of plantation trees, both in early and late stages, develop an understanding of how above and belowground processes interact to affect tree survival and identify the causes of tree fall in E. nitens.
Project Six: Improved provenance choice for native forest silviculture and management in the face of climate change will develop new, genetically informed, approaches to seed sourcing of the important ash eucalypts that account for predicted climate change and provides tools for their implementation.
The Centre looks forward to working with all new PhD candidates and industry partners on these projects and will continue to provide updates as these projects launch.
Deer management in Victoria
The Centre is pleased to announce a new PhD project on deer management in Northeast Victoria with Forest and Wood Products Australia (FWPA), Hancock Victorian Plantations, University of Sydney, and funded through the NIFPI Gippsland Centre.
Deer are a serious cost to production forestry and restoration agencies. This project will develop and field test best practice surveillance, detection, and deterrent mechanisms to monitor deer use and develop new options to reduce the impacts of these pests.
The project will provide land managers with a new understanding of how deer are using plantations and new solutions in sustainable forest management across production forestry to enable this sector to meet ambitious economic, social, and environmental targets.
Restoring the Midlands Special Issue
December 2021 saw the publication of a Special Issue on Restoring the Midlands of Tasmania, Volume 22 of Ecological Management and Restoration. This issue highlights the interaction between research, restoration agencies, and landholders in the development and implementation of tree restoration techniques in a highly degraded landscape. The publication features 15 articles, 14 of which are authored or co-authored by Centre staff or affiliates.
This publication brings together 10 years of collaborative research outcomes supported by the ARC Training Centre for Forest Value and previous forestry centres at the University of Tasmania as well as Greening Australia, Tasmanian Land Conservancy, Bush Heritage Australia, Department of Natural Resources and Environment Tasmania, Tasmanian Farmers and Graziers Association, NRM North, Ian Potter Foundation and Pennicott Wilderness Journeys.
This multidisciplinary, multi-institutional, science-based approach to ecological restoration is focused on the Midlands of Tasmania which is one of Australia’s biodiversity hotspots.
The Midlands offered up a model system for landscape-scale restoration and has the additional benefit of a high level of cooperation between landowners, government departments, environmental agencies and university researchers across the land management space.
Dr Neil Davidson, an Associate with the Centre for Forest Value and Restoration Ecologist with Greening Australia, was the Guest Editor and author or co-author of 12 articles in the issue. He comments that
this $11 million dollar project established 1800 hectares of native vegetation to buffer and connect native vegetation remnants on two ecologically modelled biodiversity corridors, one through Ross and the other through Epping.
Dr Davidson continues, "the aim was to provide landscape-scale connectivity for native mammals and birds so they could move along ecological gradients in response to climate change, within the only nationally recognised biodiversity hotspot in Tasmania. In addition, we were to provide shade and shelter for stock and crops in a farming landscape that was 70% cleared of native vegetation, with only 10% in a healthy state (right on the internationally accepted limit for rapid loss of biodiversity).
Land clearing and tree decline have left much of the landscape devoid of trees - trees needed for stock shelter during extremes of weather. There was a need to build strong relationships with land owners and the community because this region was also 98% privately owned.
With global climates rapidly changing and effects on tree health already showing, it is becoming increasingly important for the restoration sector to consider moving away from the traditional local-is-best approach to strategies that build climate resilience in our restored forests.
Dr Peter Harrison, Postdoctoral Researcher in the Centre, is the author of the paper ‘Climate change and the suitability of local and non-local species for ecosystem restoration’ and comments:
climates across the Midlands have rapidly changed over the last century and we are tracking the worst-case scenario of a 3-4 °C increase in mean temperatures.
He continued, "this warming is starting to shift populations out of their climate envelope, and the models are telling us that in nearly all cases, restoring eucalypts in the Midlands will need to mix local seed with seed from populations already growing in future climates".
Understanding how populations from different climates grow in a common environment has been a core research focus of the Centre, to inform industry on best practices for mixing seed from future climates.
Field Day Workshop
A Field Day Growing trees that survive, flourish, and benefit the farm, wildlife, and the community is being held at Connorville on the 26th May 2022. Further details can be found on the flyer here.
The Ecological Management and Restoration Special Issue Restoring the Midlands of Tasmania is available for free access online here.
ARC Centre for Forest Value celebrates six years of excellence
The initial funding period of the Australian Research Council’s Industrial Training Centre for Forest Value finished on 16 November, ending a highly successful six years of training and research in the forest and forest products area.
To celebrate the achievements of the Centre, an afternoon event was attended by staff, former and present students, and representatives of organisations across the forestry supply chain and the ARC.
A project outcomes booklet was launched at the event, highlighting some of the key research produced by the Centre.
The Centre for Forest Value commenced in 2016 and was funded through the ARC Industrial Transformation Program and eight industry partners: Sustainable Timber Tasmania (STT), Forico, Greening Australia (GA), Private Forests Tasmania (PFT), Forest Practices Authority (FPA), Neville Smith Forest Products, SFM Environmental Solutions, and Forest and Wood Products Australia (FWPA).
The Centre provided an ideal platform to conduct research to solve industry identified challenges and provide researchers and students industry access and expertise. The research program was managed under four themes that spanned the forest products supply chain: forest production and certification, products and manufacturing, supply chain integration and information management, and forestry socio-economics.
One of the Centre’s primary aims was to train industry-ready research fellows and graduates. Across the four themes, the Centre directly funded 11 PhD students, 4 post-doctoral researchers and supported numerous research projects and another 15 affiliated PhD students. The research teams have been productive, producing more than 150 peer reviewed articles, securing an additional $3.8 million in funding, giving 125 presentations, hosting 24 workshops, and attending over 700 industry meetings.
Centre Director Associate Professor Julianne O’Reilly-Wapstra paid tribute to these achievements.
I am very proud of what we have achieved as the Centre for Forest Value, and I look forward to seeing what new innovations and new solutions we can deliver for the sector in the economic, environmental and social values of our forested estates.
The Centre has proven to be a great career stepping-stone with all graduates and fellows securing postdoctoral fellowships and working within the university sector or directly within industry.
“Through its students, staff and collaborators, the Centre has produced significant industry-relevant research,” Associate Professor O’Reilly-Wapstra said.
We now better understand the quality of wood from E. nitens plantations so that managers can breed for certain traits and help match wood characteristics of logs to their optimal final product, to maximise value. We understand which provenances of eucalypt restoration species are best suited for future plantings under future climates. We have developed unmanned aircraft systems to provide quick, efficient and safe mechanisms for sample collection at tree crowns and we have made transport operations at ports more efficient to decrease port congestion.
Representing the industry at the event was Suzette Weeding, General Manager of Land Management at Sustainable Timber Tasmania.
Suzette congratulated the Centre on its success and noted that STT, along with the other industry partners, had seen significant benefits through its operation and outputs.
A key mission of the Centre was to facilitate the engagement of students and post-docs with industry to ensure their research was industry relevant. This is clearly seen in the content of the research outputs, where students have often directly collaborated and utilised industry resources. This, in turn, provides the opportunities for the rapid uptake by industry of their research findings.
Recent Research publications
Recent publication highlights from these themes include:
- Zara Marais recently published her paper on Shelterbelt species composition and age determine structure: Consequences for ecosystem services (Agriculture, Ecosystems & Environment) in collaboration with Thomas Baker, Mark Hunt and Daniel Mendham.
- Sean Krisanski published Forest Structural Complexity Tool—An Open Source, Fully-Automated Tool for Measuring Forest Point Clouds (Remote Sensing) with collaborators Mohammad Sadegh Taskhiri, Susana Gonzalez Aracil, David Herries, Allie Muneri, Mohan Babu Gurung, James Montgomery and Paul Turner.
- Rose Brinkhoff and Han Ammitzboll both recently published in Forest Ecology and Management on Nitrogen fertiliser only increases leaf area in the lower crown of mid-rotation Eucalyptus nitens plantations and Contrasting successional responses of soil bacteria and fungi to post-logging burn severity respectively. Rose Collaborated with Daniel Mendham, Mark Hunt, Greg Unwind and Mark Hovenden. Hans collaborated with Gregory Jordan, Susan Baker, Jules Freeman and Andrew Bissett.
A list of all Centre publications can be viewed on the CFV website.
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The ARC Training Centre for Forest Value (CFV) works collaboratively with stakeholders to conduct research of excellence to solve forestry industry, agroforestry, and forest restoration and conservation challenges
The CFV is funded through granting schemes, industry, environmental and community stakeholders