What We Heard

The Knowledge Summit:

On March 11-13, 2024, experts from across the province came together to dive deep into what is needed to support innovative silviculture in BC at the Silviculture Innovation Knowledge Summit. Together, we worked to collectively identify knowledge gaps and opportunities for advancing innovative silviculture practices. The objective was to create a “roadmap” outlining knowledge gaps and contextualizing why they are important and how they could be addressed through research and extension.

What are the KEy Findings?

The work carried out at the Knowledge Summit is captured by a What We Heard report (available above). The outcomes will guide the SIP in future decision making on investments and we hope the broader forestry community will also benefit from the What We Heard report.

Ideas and trends identified in this report offer a transparent summary of the perspectives of the attendees. The SIP program team synthesized thirty-five ideas on the opportunities for progressing innovative silviculture. One of the key take-aways focused on understanding the greatest investment needed to support this shifting paradigm in forestry. These were summarized into five broad categories:

1. Create a Knowledge Hub: Create a searchable open-access data repository to store knowledge on silvicultural activities and research products.
2. Build capacity and grow communities of practice: Bring together communities of practice across the province and help support new ones. Build capacity to carry out innovative silviculture by offering opportunities to advance learning, support mentorship and facilitate knowledge transfer across career stages.
3. Support new research: Support new research projects that address longstanding and novel issues using multiple knowledge systems, new technologies, and broad-scale holistic perspectives. Make sure that research connects the creators to the users.
4. Synthesize existing knowledge: Summarize and synthesize existing research and communicate findings to practitioners and researchers.
5. Extend knowledge into practice: Help translate knowledge into practical and useful products to support practitioners, such as toolkits, guides, and workshops.

The full What We Heard report provides further details on these research and extension needs, as well as a summary of needs specific to each Knowledge Summit theme: partial harvest, fire and silviculture, and intensive silviculture.

DOWNLOAD REPORT HERE

We are extremely grateful to everyone that generously contributed their time and energy to our Knowledge Summit. We look forward to continue growing our community of leaders in innovative silviculture.

Thank you from the whole SIP team!