The Institute of Foresters of Australia
ABN 48 083 197 586
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PO Box 576 Crows Nest NSW 1585
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The Institute of Foresters of Australia
ABN 48 083 197 586
Rob de Fégely, IFA President
Rob is IFA President and Director or
VicForests. He has over 28 years of experience in the Australian forest industry and he has a strong interest in natural resource management particularly the integration of forestry and agriculture.
Rob’s early career was spent in plantation development and natural forest management before he commenced consulting in 1990.
His experience covers all states of Australia, for both government and corporate clients and he has also worked extensively in Asia, the Pacific and North
America. During this time he worked on forest resource assessment, valuations and reviews of forest product processing and market research, including company and broader industry wide strategies.
He was Managing Director (Australia) of the Finnish firm
Jaakko Pöyry Consulting for 10 years prior to establishing his own consulting business in 2006. He has been appointed to a number of government advisory panels and served on Boards in Papua New Guinea,
New Zealand and Australia.
Dr Neil Byron
Neil is a lapsed forester (?) now an environmental economist and policy analyst. He is currently Chair of the Independent Biodiversity
Legislation Review for the NSW cabinet. In his spare time, he’s a member of the Expert Panel for the
NSW Marine Estate Management Authority, an
Adjunct Professor at the Institute of Applied Ecology at University of Canberra, a member of the
Wentworth Group of Concerned Scientists, a Director of the Earthwatch Institute, and Chair of the Trust for
Nature Foundation.
As Productivity Commissioner, he conducted over 25 national Productivity Commission Inquiries, specialising in the environment, sustainable development and natural resources management issues, for 12 years to 2010. Previous employment was with Bureau of Agricultural Economics, teaching forest economics at ANU, Director of the Graduate
Program in Environment and Development at ANU, and Assistant Director General of the Center for
International Forestry Research, based in Indonesia.
Neil has an honours degree in Forest Science from the
ANU and a masters and doctorate in resource & environmental economics from University of British
Columbia, in Vancouver, Canada.
Paul Wells, NSW DPI
Dr John Keniry AM, Commissioner of the NSW Resources Commission
John took up his current position in
December 2012. Prior to that, he had served as Chairman or Director of numerous agribusiness companies and on the Boards of
Government organisations at State and Federal level.
His interest in NRM derives from some twenty years as a board member of the NSW Environment
Protection Authority and a six-year term as a member of the Prime Ministers Science, Engineering and
Innovation Council, as well as his direct involvement as owner of a fine wool and lamb producing enterprise in Central West NSW.
A chemical engineer by profession, John maintains a keen interest in innovation, and, in addition to his role with the Resources Commission, he is presently
Chairman of the Sheep Cooperative Research Centre,
The Australian Wool Exchange and The Sydney
Institute of Marine Science. He is a Fellow of The
Australian Institute of Company Directors, The Royal
Australian Chemical Institute, and The Academy of
Technological Sciences and Engineering.
Paul is a professional Forester of 25 years of experience, including private consultancy experience in the plantations investment and valuation areas across SE Australia, followed by
18 years of experience in operational native forest management with NSW Forest Service.
More recently he has been with NSW DPI responsible for the state’s plantation authorisation and audit functions, the NSW Forest Industry Structural
Adjustment Unit managing various native forest structural adjustment programs, and forest policy management for NSW DPI.
Paul is currently responsible for the NSW DPI Forestry
Group including forest policy and industry development programs, plantation authorisation and regulation and delivering forest research projects for Forest
Corporation NSW and other forestry partners
He is also the Executive Officer of the NSW Forest
Industries Taskforce, and has been involved in the
National Primary Industries RD&E groups for the
Forestry and Bioenergy sectors.
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The Institute of Foresters of Australia
ABN 48 083 197 586
Mr Paul Ryan, Director, Australian
Resilience Centre
Paul is the founding Director of the
Australian Resilience Centre, a company that aims to increase the capacity of individuals, communities and organisations to face future challenges. In particular he focuses on the application of resilience thinking, adaptive governance and management and social learning to build capacity to create and manage change. For the past five years
Paul has worked as an advisor to federal, state and regional agencies incorporating resilience concepts into natural resource management and planning. Paul was recently appointed to the IUCN Taskforce on
Resilience, has previously worked for the Resilience
Alliance - the international network responsible for the development of resilience theory, and with CSIRO coordinating ecological and multi-disciplinary research. In 2012 he founded the Resilience Planning
Community of Practice, an Australian based network of resilience practitioners. Paul has previously worked on-ground for state agencies and the Goulburn
Broken Catchment Management Authority in Victoria where he was involved in the development and implementation of regional catchment strategies, programs and incentive schemes. Paul comes from a farming background, his family have been farming in northern Victoria since the 1860s.
Dr Joe Landsberg
Joe has Bachelors and Masters degrees from the University of
Natal and a PhD from the
University of Bristol, in the UK.
His research career started in agriculture in Africa, followed by three years in
Scotland working on the effects of weather on trees, and ten years leading a research group in England.
This led to his appointment as Chief of the (then)
Division of Forest Research of Australia’s
Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research
Organization (CSIRO). The Division comprised more than 200 scientists and support staff concerned with research into all aspects of forests and forestry.
Completing his contract there Joe moved on to become Director for Natural Resources Management in the Murray-Darling Basin Commission. In the 1990s he worked in NASA’s Terrestrial Ecology Program, being involved with the Boreas project, a major exercise aimed at improving knowledge about the effects of climate change on boreal forests.
Since his retirement he has remained involved with the community of scientists and foresters concerned
Learning to change: turning resilience and adaptive management theory into practice.
While resilience theory and adaptive management concepts are widely espoused, there are very few well documented examples of these concepts being turned into practice to drive improvements in outcomes. I will talk about our attempts to turn this theory into practice over the last decade with NRM organisations, agencies and other organisations managing water, climate change, biosecurity and other issues. That experience points to a number of very practical steps that can be taken to ensure these concepts can contribute to improved management and outcomes, these practical steps and some of the challenges and pitfalls will be presented.
Resilience and adaptive management: background theory and implications for forests
Ideas about resilience and adaptive management are currently being applied in analyzing the responses to disturbance of a wide range of complex systems, including lakes, wetlands, coral reefs, rangelands and the global ecosystem. This presentation provides an outline of the theoretical basis of those ideas and considers their application to forests and forest management.
The condition and resilience of ecosystems depend on the linkages and interactions between variables across a wide range of spatial and temporal scales. Disturbances change the state, or condition, of ecosystems. Resilience may be defined as the capacity of ecosystems to recover from disturbance and return to, and maintain, their original state, i.e. to sustain their original structure and functions.
Resilience is not a stable property; it expands and contracts, depending on the current state of the system.
Where disturbances continue over long periods, or are sufficiently serious over short periods, ecosystems may reach tipping points, or thresholds, where they flip from one relatively stable state to another. Mitigation or removal of the disturbing factor(s) may not result in return of the system to its previous state or condition.
Adaptive management is based on recognizing the fact
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The Institute of Foresters of Australia
ABN 48 083 197 586 with forest ecology.
Joe has published four books, edited/co-edited five others, and published many scientific papers. He has held visiting professorships in Australia, New Zealand and Finland. He is a member of the Finnish Academy of Science and Letters. that ecosystem resilience depends on variables at a number of levels, with a range of response times. For example, in the case of forests, the variables may be insects or diseases acting on foliage (responses times days—weeks); tree growth in response to foliage growth or damage (response times months—seasons); responses to drought, fire, harvesting, re-establishment.
Management must recognise how disturbance factors act on systems and the paths (adaptive cycles) likely to be followed by system responses to disturbance, including the possibility of crossing thresholds. Human activities are primary factors affecting ecosystem function, so the role of humans must be explicitly considered.
To illustrate the concepts discussed I present examples of insect attacks on drought-affected forests in the western
USA; also the effects of human activities on the mountain ash forests of Victoria and on the red gum forest areas of central NSW. An example of catastrophic collapse across the threshold of sustainability is provided by the response of some blue gum plantations in WA to the combined effects of drought — possibly caused by climate change — and poor management decisions.
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The Institute of Foresters of Australia
ABN 48 083 197 586
Vic Jurskis
Vic graduated from ANU as a
Bachelor of Science in Forestry in
1976. He was employed by New
South Wales’ forest service as a labourer, forester, researcher, manager and silviculturist over thirty six years, working in eucalypt forest, rainforest, cypress, and native and exotic plantations across the state. In 2012, the embryonic ForestryCorp saw no need for a silviculturist in the new business, and his
Todd Maher, Natural Resources
Commission
Plenty Talk, No Action
Australia is facing serious socioeconomic and environmental problems, chiefly woody thickening, recurrent megafires, chronic eucalypt decline, plagues of pests, parasites, diseases and weeds, and ongoing loss of biodiversity.
Around the same time that the terminology of adaptive management was introduced, the process was hijacked.
Ecological theories were proposed that became the basis for highly specialized research of small facets of a large problem. This type of research has mostly replaced position was made redundant. Vic says that this was a sensible decision in view of the impediments to adaption that are the subject of his presentation today. He retains a passionate interest in land management, especially fire management and its implications for forest health, fire safety and biodiversity. Vic continues to produce scientific papers, and give evidence to parliamentary inquiries.
He is currently writing a book about firestick ecology. observation and adaption. Management implications of such research have been misconstrued, and environmental instruments that superficially appear to promote adaption are being used to prevent or reverse it.
Resilience is being lost at an alarming rate. Vic will provide some examples for discussion.
Monitoring, evaluation and reporting – supporting effective adaptive management
Todd has had over a decade of experience in providing independent advice to Government on natural resource management issues. Since joining the Natural
Resources Commission he has been involved in major reviews including forest assessments for the NSW riverina river red gums and south western and
Brigalow cypress forests and landscape vegetation management. In 2012, he led a review of NSW’s monitoring, evaluation and reporting strategy for natural resource management.
Prior to joining the Commission, Todd worked at the
NSW Roads and Traffic Authority developing and assessing environment performance standards across a range of large scale infrastructure projects.
Adaptive management has been described as ‘learning by doing, and doing to learn’. This simple mantra sets the tone for effective MER. It should help us develop the right questions to ask in the first place, deliver the best possible information to answer to those questions and develop the next best question to support better decisions in the future.
Governments are seeking to move beyond the question
‘Did it happen?’, and more towards ‘Did it work, and why?’ Their fundamental questions include ‘how effective are our efforts, and are they enough? How much return did we get back for the dollar we spent today, and can we sustain them over time? What are the risks or costs of not doing more? What are our future options, and what do we do next?’
Herein lie some of the real challenges beyond the technical ‘what, where and how to measure things’.
We need monitoring programs that focus on the questions being asked and avoid ‘collecting data first, and asking the questions later’. We need to find the balance between maintaining essential long-term core datasets and targeted programs that tests the effectiveness of our management in a timely manner.
We need to make better use of existing data and information, and analytical skills that can interrogate and integrate multiple lines of evidence. We need to prioritise and share scarce resources, and collaborate across
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The Institute of Foresters of Australia
ABN 48 083 197 586 institutions and tenures. We need systems that create timely, accessible and dynamic information products and services to decisions makers at all scales.
Finally, and above all we need to institutionalise a culture that actively seeks to learn, reflect and challenge our held norms for policy, rules and governance.
Nick Cameron, Forest Landscape
Services
Nick Cameron is a professional forester with 23 years of forest management experience.
Nick’s formal qualifications include a Bachelor of
Science (Forestry) degree from the Australian National
University and an Executive Master’s Degree in Public
Administration from the University of Sydney. Nick has long standing interest in forest policy. The
Institute of Foresters of Australia (IFA) has provided
Nick with a platform to pursue this interest and between 2009 and 2012 he held the position of
Director and Chair of its NSW Division. Nick is a current member of the NSW Forest Industries
Taskforce. For much of his career Nick worked for the
Forestry Corporation of NSW in a variety roles. This experience has given Nick a state-wide perspective as well as an understanding of how things work on the ground. In 2013 Nick formed Forest Landscape
Services where he currently works as a sole trader. He also works part time for the NSW DPI’s Forest Science unit. Nick spends his spare time in the Hunter Valley where he owns a small grazing property.
Drivers of resilient landscapes
At the time of European settlement we had abundant biodiversity, sustainable land management and world class fire management practices. Along the way skills and knowledge were lost and biodiversity declined.
Today we like to think that we have learned from our mistakes and are delivering sophisticated best management practice. In reality we have a complex web of tenure based laws and divisive governance structures that are clouding our view and diverting our focus from the things which are important.
The issues which threaten our natural landscapes are common to all tenures and require a more holistic and focused approach.
The New South Wales government is the State’s largest landholder and the driver of all of its natural resource laws and policies. Its leadership and the way it organises its agencies and resources is fundamental to being able to get the priorities right.
Change will not be easy and will require persistence, patience and strong leadership. If we are successful in redirecting our attention toward mitigating common threats the re- emergence of resilience landscapes will naturally follow.
Rod Keenan, University of
Melbourne
Rod is Professor of Forest and
Ecosystem Science at the
University of Melbourne. He was
Director of the Victorian Centre for Climate Change Adaptation
Research at The University of Melbourne from 2009-
2014. The Centre is a research partnership between
Victorian universities funded by the Victorian
Government. He has research interests in climate change adaptation, the role of forests in providing carbon sequestration and other ecosystem services, forest resource assessment and environmental policy.
He has worked for the Federal Government, in a number of Australian states and in Canada, Japan and
Papua New Guinea. He is a member of the UN-FAO
Advisory Group for the Global Forest Resource
Assessment.
Impediments to resilient landscape management
The landscape approach is being widely promoted as a solution to management natural resources. It is argued that by considering the different objectives, uses and values integrated way that we can provide more durable and sustainable supply of goods and services in a changing climate and under changing social and economic conditions. However, there are a variety of barriers to achieving an integrated approach. These include social, cultural, administrative, knowledge integration and management issues. This presentation will discuss these different types of barriers and consider potential solutions for new approaches to the design and management of resilient landscapes.
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The Institute of Foresters of Australia
ABN 48 083 197 586
Dr James Brazill-Boast is a Senior
Project Officer in the Ecosystems and Threatened Species team,
Regional Operations and Heritage
Group, NSW Office of Environment and Heritage. His work focuses primarily on the development and implementation of the Saving our Species program, the NSW Government’s new approach to managing threatened species. Specifically, James works with ecologists, conservation managers and NRM agencies to develop management prescriptions for various NSW threatened species as well as developing state-wide frameworks for prioritising investment in, and monitoring, evaluating and reporting on threatened species management. He has been with OEH for four years, prior to which he completed a PhD in the behavioural ecology and conservation of the Gouldian finch in the Kimberley region of Northern Australia.
The Saving our Species Program: Prioritising
investment and evaluating outcomes
The NSW Office of Environment and Heritage is revitalising threatened species management through an innovative new program - Saving our Species (SoS).
This program has an ambitious but achievable objective, ‘To maximise the number of threatened species that are secure in the wild in NSW for 100 years.’ It aims to achieve this by defining more targeted management, clearly articulating objectives, using a transparent and objective process to prioritise investment and demonstrating return on this investment through a rigorous monitoring, evaluation and reporting framework. A monitoring, evaluation and reporting framework has been developed specifically for SoS that will enable the program to link expenditure to outcomes, evaluate and report on progress towards objectives across the program consistently, inform decision-making and transparently demonstrate return-on-investment to the public. Implementing MER and facilitating adaptive management at such a scale is a key challenge for the program, particularly given its longterm goals.
Stewart Stuart Matthews, CSIRO
Dr Stuart Matthews is a research scientist at the
CSIRO Lad and Water Flagship. He specialises in understanding the physics of heat and mass transfer as drivers of fuel moisture. Stuart’s work investigates the links between climate, weather, fuel and fire behaviour. Since joining CSIRO he has the led the development of a process-based model of fuel moisture, including production of operational tools for predicting fuel moisture in dry eucalypt forest and mallee-heath scrub. Currently his work includes use of regional climate model output to investigate the effects of climate change on availability of fuels to burn, and measurement and modelling of fuel moisture, focusing on the effects of topography on fuel availability.
Sarah Carr is the Project Manager of the NSW grazing study and an Area Manager with the NSW National
Parks and Wildlife Service, Office of Environment and
Heritage. Sarah has worked in protected area and wildlife management with the NSW and
Commonwealth governments since 1997. Sarah’s formal qualifications include Bachelor of Arts and
Bachelor of Science (Honours) degrees from the
Australian National University, a Graduate Diploma of
Applied Science (Parks, Recreation and Heritage) from
Charles Sturt University and a Master of Wildlife
Management degree from Macquarie University.
Fire, change and uncertainty
Cattle grazing in SW NSW reserve network
On 13 November 2012 the then Minister for the
Environment announced a scientific study of grazing in selected parts of the river red gum reserves in the
Riverina and in the cypress woodland reserves of central west NSW where grazing occupation permits or licences already exist. The NSW grazing study will be undertaken over a three year period, ending in late 2016, and will establish what biodiversity outcomes can be derived from stock grazing, and will consider related issues such as the
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The Institute of Foresters of Australia
ABN 48 083 197 586
Sarah has a long standing interest in public policy and has undertaken research into the application of the precautionary principle to the development of public policy. social and economic benefits of grazing, weed control, fuel management, stock access to water, and fencing. It is envisaged that the results of the grazing study will be used to inform decisions about the future of the red gum and cypress grazing permits and licences.
Ecological thinning in NSW cypress Warwick Bratby
Warwick’s 36 years experience as a professional Forester in the NSW forestry agency included 25 in senior management positions at regional level. He has worked extensively with other agencies in natural resource initiatives, including agency representative on the steering committee for the
Brigalow Regional Assessment, assisting Natural
Resources Commission in assessments, developing conservation criteria and protocols, working on wetland projects. Warwick actively participated in major changes in governance (from agency to corporation), public land use (much State forest became reserve) and regulation.
White cypress stands are a good candidate for ecological thinning under active adaptive management as:
- They are broadly distributed across the landscape, with much of it in regrowth phase,
- Much is known about cypress growth and response,
- Some thinning impacts have been studied,
- Operational opportunities exist (timing, revenue).
Without careful intervention, adverse outcomes for landscape resilience are likely due to cypress being fire sensitive and highly tolerant of competition. Active intervention is advocated.
Whilst empirical data for whole-of-ecosystem response models is scarce, we know enough about cypress and related systems to set out some broad expectations relating to stand structure management and to infer likely trajectories/outcomes that would flow from that.
His extensive experience with white cypress over the past 25 years includes development of Forest
Management Plans and associated supplementary plans, devising the nature conservation regime and associated management zoning, development of silvicultural specifications and the implementation and audit of silvicultural works. He played a lead role in pursuit of cost-effective wildlife survey and biodiversity monitoring.
Resilient landscapes provide habitat diversity over space and time. For ecological thinning to underpin this, its objectives must include elements related to landscape outcomes over time, plus any local site-specific issues.
Some potential broad aims for such thinning could include a more open structure, maintaining representation of mature cypress, encouraging more large-crowned trees.
Warwick remains passionate about delivering diverse outcomes in a complex natural resource environment and dynamic policy setting.
So why is ecological thinning in white cypress not being practiced? The knowledge is incomplete, monitoring tools are new, and objectives and funding are unresolved.
What is needed if ecological thinning in white cypress is to be realised? Several suggestions will be discussed.
River red gum ecological thinning trial
Tim O’Kelly
Tim graduated with a forestry degree from the
University of Melbourne in 1994. He worked in production forestry with NSW and Victorian government agencies from 1995- 2011 before changing to NSW National Parks.
PO Box 576 Crows Nest NSW 1585
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The Institute of Foresters of Australia
ABN 48 083 197 586
Ross Peacock
Dr Ross Peacock is a Senior
Research Fellow In Biological
Sciences at Macquarie University and has established his own consulting business Vegetation
Sciences Australia providing scientific advisory services to government, industry and NGO’s. Ross’s 25 years of experience in forest and vegetation planning, research, operations and regional management has be gained from a career with the public forest and NRM agencies in Victoria,
Tasmania and NSW before moving into a research leadership role focussing on climate related forest dynamics. Ross has been very active in the development of the Australian Standard® for forest management as a member of the Technical Reference
Committee since 2005 and in providing advice to governments on the management of world heritage properties and during the numerous technical reviews of forest practices codes for native forests and plantations.
Active management of NSW coastal forests
The management of the crown and private hardwood estate in NSW follows either a complex environmental regulatory regime or a codified planning approval process which aims to maintain environmental values and deliver agreed product types and volumes to industry. The current review of this approach has recognised its general shortcomings in terms of implementation and compliance costs and proposes to deliver a new outcomes based approach based on adaptive management principles.
After nearly 20 years of prescriptive management of the coastal hardwood forests the discussion has finally commenced on a multi-scale landscape approach that has the potential to deliver measureable environmental and economic outcomes using structured decision-making processes. Whether it can be achieved will depend on the willingness of the regulators to truly embrace adaptive management principles and invest in the necessary model development, objective setting and monitoring processes.
Good outcomes will be challenging to achieve, measure and communicate however it is a process we must embrace if we are to move towards a more resilient coastal forest landscape.
Dr Patrick Baker, University of Melbourne
Dr Chela Powell, VicForests
Research and implementation of management of
Leadbetter’s possum
Managing for resilience: insights from a landscape model
Craig Nitschke, University of
Melbourne
Craig is a Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Ecosystem and
Forest Sciences, Faculty of Science at the University of Melbourne. He is also a Registered Professor Forester in British Columbia Canada. Craig is a forest and landscape ecologist who focusses on understanding the impacts of climate, climate change, disturbance and management on forest ecosystems and ecosystem services. His research also focuses on the role of sustainable forest management and adaptation strategies for reducing the vulnerabilities of forest ecosystems and landscapes to climate change. Tree, stand and landscape modelling are common approaches used in his research. Craig is currently leading the Forest Vulnerability and Health project funded by the State of Victoria’s Department of Environment and Primary Industries Integrated
Forest and Ecosystem Research Program.
PO Box 576 Crows Nest NSW 1585
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