The Lil’wat Nation is working to foster community food security by restoring and activating Indigenous knowledge around traditional food systems. Our project examines ‘Ecosystem Services’ approaches as one way to support local food security while also protecting culturally-important environmental services. Led by a Lil’wat Food Committee, this project will engage community members in community planning and visioning exercises that evaluate what future paths for environmental stewardship are the highest priority.

Veneer drying has traditionally been done using a qualitative approach. Although it is effective in assessing how any modification in parameters impacts veneer quality, it often yields a significant loss in quality due to delays involved in reaching the kiln's steady state following parameter modification. However, kilns are now being equipped with various sensors that allow the tracking of many parameters related to both the kiln and the veneers. The research objective is to link raw material characteristics with the veneer drying process.

The aspirations of aboriginal communities are a critical part of decision making regarding land and resource use, policy and community development, and strategic planning. To help achieve aboriginal aspirations, this project aims to develop, apply, and evaluate a novel approach to aid aboriginal community decision making and solution creation/implementation.

Forest management in Canada will be more and more constrained by species habitat requirements as well as the risks and results of natural disturbances. The recent, sever Mountain Pine Beetle outbreak in the interior of British Columbia resulted in a harvest shortage of lodgepole pine in this region. Forest managers now rely heavily on non-pine harvests, mainly within the Interior Douglas-fire forest type. This forest type requires partial cutting and is further constrained by several ecological and social forest management objectives.

Pulp and paper mill sludge (PPMS) is the main organic residual generated from the wastewater treatment of the pulp and paper industry. In Quebec’s province, an annual amount of 400 000 tons of PPMS are landfilled. Pilot scale measurements in 2013-2014 indicated that greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from landfilling were the highest compared to agricultural or energy uses.

For many reasons, forest management in Canada will be constrained by ecological and social forest management objectives. Along with meeting the diverse needs of society, forest managers will need to consider increased demands for renewable resources, such as wood. Wood, as opposed to concrete and steel, has a positive impact on the global carbon cycle but is also strong enough to build large buildings. Therefore, there will be an increased demand for stronger wood in the future.

Potato crop suffers from several devastating diseases. Genetic resistance is the best way to manage these diseases but potato is sexually quite incompatible. A novel technology called genome editing offers genetic improvement, similar to conventional breeding, where the susceptible genes in a cultivar are cut and replaced with disease resistance genes from another cultivar, with no change to rest of the genome.

Botanical extracts with the potential to stimulate crop plant growth or performance must be rigorous tested as part of new product development. Similarly, botanical extracts that control microbial growth on plant tissues (including plant pathogenic fungi, bacteria, nematodes, etc.) or that control insect or arachnid pests on plants (aphids, whiteflies, mealybugs, mites, etc.) must be tested for unintended toxicity or inhibitory growth effects on plants.

At the moment, BC has no comprehensive climate change curriculum in high schools, and educators lack coordinated materials to support its teaching. In an effort to narrow this gap, the Collaborative for Advanced Landscape Planning (CALP) at the Faculty of Forestry, UBC partnered with the Delta School District, to develop an educational and compelling videogame – Future Delta 2.0 (FD2), which brings together methods from commercial gaming a participatory research to address climate change science in an innovative place-based game environment.

A&L Canada Labs Inc. is developing a UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) or drone with a multi-spectral camera for various precision agriculture applications. The multi-spectral camera has 6 bands: one in the red band, one in the blue band, one in the green band, and three in the NIR regions. The scope of this project is to develop precision agriculture products from the images acquired by the A&L Canada Labs Inc. camera. The first application is late blight disease detection over potato fields.