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The current mountain pine beetle (MPB) epidemic within British Columbia now affects more than 8 million hectares (an area the size of Lake Superior) and is expected to kill at least 80% of its lodgepole pine, the primary tree species. The enormous scale of the infestation and the large volumes of timber affected represent an immediate opportunity but also present a longer term threat to forest resource-based communities in all areas of BC where lodgepole pine is present in economic quantities.

The aim of the mountain pine beetle and timber supply (MPB&TS) project is to model the effects that various resource management strategies for the mountain pine beetle epidemic will have on both the short and long term timber supply of BC. The outcome of this project could ultimately have profound socioeconomic effects for many communities in BC and, potentially, Alberta.

We have adapted the FSSAM timber supply model to include the effects of the mountain pine beetle infestation. This was done by tagging each pine-bearing stand with its time-dependent projected level of attack (overall percent death) due to the beetles. This tagging was performed by the BC Ministry of Forests and Range (MoFR) using a Provincial-level projection model also developed by MoFR. Within FSSAM the progression of the infestation in every tagged pine layer is separately modeled and the results are combined with a decay model to estimate the economic state of the pine components. The decay model allows for a certain time until decay begins (during which all the dead timber may be used for sawlogs) and then models the decay in sawlog volumes. Since timber not suitable for sawlogs can still have other economic uses (e.g., chips and biofuels), the MPB&TS model also estimates volumes for these products, which have longer lifetimes than those for sawlogs. Finally, the model computes the non-recovered losses (i.e., the volume not used for any product).

BCS has implemented several harvesting schemes in the MPB&TS model in order to allow investigation of the effects of management strategies on the timber and product volumes and the non-recovered losses. These schemes include:

The MPB&TS model currently runs in standalone mode or in a small cluster environment. In order to perform modeling on very large forest inventory datasets within reasonable time frames, it is necessary to gain assess to a larger distributed processing environment. In the near future we are planning to install, run and test the performance of the software for modeling MPB&TS in a suitable distributed processing environment.