Then came the European pioneers, armed with axes and cross-cut saws, who selectively cut down patches of the forests. After World War II, the Europeans used power saws to enable intensive high-grade clearing, speeding up the process of converting forests into plantations. Two clear-cutting events swept across the landscape where you now stand:

• one ending in 1967, which removed one third of the forest on District Lot 63
• one ending in 1978, which cleared much of what had been spared in the 1967 clear-cutting

District Lot 63 (DL63)
The Galiano Conservancy Association purchased District lot 63 in 1998. In 2001, recognizing the compromised ecology of the stand and the opportunity to enhance connections between neighboring protected areas, we began restoring. The adjacent district lots (60 and 66) both experienced some of the original high-grade logging of the first half of the 20th Century. However, they were never 'clearcut', so these lots are now prime examples of healthy, mature forest ecosystems for much of Galiano Island and indeed much of the Coastal Douglas-fir Biogeoclimatic zone. These mature forest stands are excellent standards for comparison with the plantation on Lot 63. In evaluating the success of our restoration efforts, we take into account what we know of the logging that was done in Lot 63 and interpolate data that we gathered from mapping old stumps. This helps to reveal insights into the kinds of forest structure and diversity we should be targeting.

The Trees
The life of the Douglas-fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii ssp. menziesii) conifer trees surrounding you began in cones selectively harvested from trees growing not on Galiano, but on Southern Vancouver Island or the mainland. The seeds were germinated and became seedlings which spent their first year and a half in a commercial nursery. Each Douglas-fir tree is exactly the same age, planted by human hands in 1980. This is why we call it a plantation.

The abundance of the broad-leafed (or deciduous) trees on Galiano is nature's response to the disturbances of the past. Many deciduous trees grew here from seeds that were brought in by animals, birds, rain, or the wind (this is known as "in-seeding"). Other trees re-sprouted from stumps that were left behind. These deciduous trees would not have grown here if it weren't for the conditions (like bare soil) created by clear-cutting and planting. Over the past 50 years, most of the old growth and mature Douglas-fir forests of Galiano Island have been clear-cut and planted. We refer to this process as being converted to monoculture plantations.

Windrows
After clear-cutting the forest, in preparation for planting new trees, machines were used to push the remaining logs, stumps and soil out of the way, in order to make room for planting the new trees. This created long piles of refuse which we refer to as windrows. After creating these windrows, the site preparers burned the windrows in order to get rid of what was unnecessary and to maximize the amount of land available for planting. If you look closely, you can see the windrows in this arial photo of Lot 63. They look like veins in a leaf - growing out from the main spine. [add link to photo showing windrows highlighted?]

Restoration Treatments
Our restoration treatments can be divided into broad categories according to the degree of disturbance of the land:

• Heavily disturbed sites. These are often associated with all vegetation having been removed and intensive machine operation typically leading to severe alterations to forest soils, culminating in the complete elimination of the original forest floor. These sites include roads, landings and gravel pits. Restoration on heavily disturbed sites varied from using hand tools to clear exotic species and planting native vegetation to employing an excavator for heavy work moving soil and wood.
• Plantation land. Among the trees, we have chosen to minimize our impacts by carrying out all of our work by hand. This holds true when we are pulling apart old windrows and redistributing the wood across the forest floor, as well as when we are thinning out the trees. Much of the heavier work in the stand employs the use of a hand-operated five-ton chain hoist and a miniaturized version of a skyline logging system. With these tools we are able to safely lift and move a two-ton piece of wood across the forest floor, re-erect sizeable logs as snags, or pull plantation trees over as part of our thinning treatment.

With our restoration endeavours we are striving to increase the diversity of species and spaces within the stand. We aim to shift the current direction of growth from a dense Douglas-fir plantation toward a more diverse forest of open spaces, dense clusters, and multiple species of trees, shrubs, herbs, mosses, lichens, fungi, and a broad spectrum of animals. By promoting diversity we are enriching the capacity of the ecosystem to adapt to environmental changes such as is predicted with global warming.