Sunshine Saved

So we are now a couple months into cutting on our first forest thinning and improvement project. Doing this work we have brought in the needed expertise of our forester several times, who has helped us to put best principles into practice on our site. This involves the following site visits:

• Initial inventory and management plan. Overall description of the forest stands and their current condition. A prerequisite for all future work that is done with a forester.
• Planning and marking the cut boundaries, making a much more detailed inventory, marking the actual trees to be cut. This required two visits, one in July 2025, the second to finish in December of 2025.
• (yet to come) A visit to evaluate the quality of the work after completion. Was the prescription followed, was excessive damage done to the remaining stand?

The following image shows the relevant details of the prescription for our 6 hectare stand. Given that it is in French and using a lot of technical forestry jargon, I’ll break down some key details about it below.

Making sense of the prescription. Rather than go through every detail, I’ll just go over some points that cover the most important parts:

• We are removing 20% of the trees.
• The biggest change that I’ll notice is that we’re cutting 2/3 of the white birch, which include some of the biggest trees in the stand. We are also cutting 1/3 of the balsam fir and about 1/4 of everything else. Sugar maples will only be cut if they are already dying anyway.
  • From the prescription to seeing the actual marking, I think that they went even heavier on the birch and aspen, and lighter on the red maple and basswood.
• The total amount of maple trees (sugar and red) in this area will go from 47% to 52%. A good commercial sugarbush is often 75 to 90% maple, so we certainly are still a ways away from that.
• This entire cut will yield about 200 tons of wood. Half will be good dense firewood, one quarter will be ‘campfire’ wood (less dense wood that isn’t as desirable for wood stoves as one needs more of it), and one quarter in balsam fir. The fir we will sell to a mill to make 2x4s and other dimensional lumber, while all the rest we will process to firewood.
• We will receive a subsidy from the government for performing this cut following best practices for about $500/hectare. For the forester, to plan it, mark it, and verify it afterwards, they will receive about $1500/hectare. All of these subsidies come from the Quebec government, and are an effective way to encourage many forest owners to follow best practices.

On-the-ground progress

Two of us began cutting in early October of 2025, and have been putting in an average of one 5-6 hour day per week. We can currently manage to get about 10 tons per day to our processing landing that is one kilometre to the east of the cutting site. We cut the trees with a chainsaw, winch in the trees to the forestry trailer, lift logs into the trailer with the grapple, and when there are about 2 tons in the trailer, drive it over to our landing to unload. As of the time of this writing, we have around 70 tons on the landing, which we will process into firewood next spring and summer. We will continue cutting into January and even February if the snow doesn’t get too deep. It becomes more trouble than it is worth once there is a snowpack depth of around 1.5 or 2 feet. After we stop for the season, there will be no significant work in the woods until at least next August. This is because…
-the snow will stick around and be too deep for the rest of the winter
-in the late winter/early spring there is lots of mud which destroys trails and causes compaction if you go in with equipment
-in late spring the trees’ bark loosens as they begin to grow and damage occurs much more easily when felling trees
-in summer one really disrupts wildlife, like bird reproduction. Also it is hot, humid, and the forest is full of biting bugs.
This puts us to next August or September, when the heat of the year is abating, bugs are dying back, trees are firmed up for the coming winter, and the ground is nice and dry. That will lead us into the next fall/winter cutting season. Five or six months per year is plenty of chainsaw work for me anyway.

A few years ago I came across some videos featuringTom Wessels, a professor of ecology at Antioch University. These videos were largely about “Reading the Forested Landscape“, where he figures out a land’s history from what one can see today. He takes what he knows of the local history, and combines it with on-the-ground observations, like what type of forest is there, whether there are old walls and fences, whether there is evidence of prior tillage, etc. From this, he can tell a lot about the history of that particular place. With many of these rural spaces, remnants of the past land use stay visible for decades and even centuries, if you just know how to look for them. So now I’ve decided to take a stab at reading my own property in this fashion, and figure out what I can about the forest stand that I’m currently working in, doing a thinning and improvement cut of a maple forest.

For our dive into history, this image shows the relevant parts:
Grey line – bulldozed skid road built in the 1950s
Orange line – skid road used in a 2008 harvest, it may predate that time
Dark blue – creek and swamp that impedes access to this stand
New road – visible as the area of cleared trees leading to the house, built in 2013
Turquoise – property lines

I have a set of facts that I know about my property and our region that go into my best educated guess of the forest management history for this 60 acre parcel of our property. It is bounded by a reservoir to the west and north, a creek valley to the east, and a neighbouring property to the south. The facts that pertain are:

1. Mid 1800s – Major pine logging: The first push up the Gatineau River by logging was in the early to mid 1800s. Big groups of loggers sent massive amounts of wood to market and built the cities of Ottawa and Gatineau. They harvested all the easily accessible pine throughout the region. I don’t have exact dates, but the first farms were established in Low around 1840. These farms tended to arrive around the same time as the loggers, supplying the men and their horse teams with the food that they needed, rather than trying to ship it up from further south. On our particular property, it is close and accessible enough to the Gatineau River to assume that sometime in the mid-1800s the mature pines were logged out.
2. 1875 – The first deeds for our property were issued. A farmer and ancestor of Irvin Brennan (who owned our property until 2011) bought this land from the government and founded his farm here. The main farmstead was on the other side of the creek, making this area inconvenient to get to but not totally inaccessible.
3. 1932 – Completion of the Paugan Dam: The lake adjacent to our forest stand is part of the reservoir created by the flooding from the Paugan Dam. Bringing the lake so close made it much easier to transport wood from our property, floating pine, spruce and fir logs down the river to market.
4. 1950s – Bulldozer construction of a forest road: Irvin Brennan told me that the main logging path through the forest was constructed with a bulldozer in the 1950s. He didn’t know an exact year, but this path is still very visible and easily traversed by a vehicle today. It goes from north to south on a flatter area between a ridge to its east, and the reservoir to its west.
5. 2008 – Thinning cut – Irvin further told me that he had brought in loggers in 2008 to do a thinning cut of this part of the forest. He told me that the loggers were primarily harvesting mature aspen. We bought the property in 2011, and could still clearly see the signs of this harvest.
6. 2025 – Thinning cut – We are now starting a thinning cut of our own to improve the stand and push it towards a greater proportion of maple trees. This will primarily remove trees of shorter-lived species that are now dying of old age (aspen, white birch, balsam fir), as well as poor quality trees of all species. So far we have now cut dozens of trees, and I have counted the tree rings on a bunch of them. These counts ranged from 80 to 107 years old. The area we are currently cutting is very typical of the forest stand as a whole, so I think it is safe to assume that most of this forest stand is an even aged forest that averages around 90 years old.

This set of evidence makes me think that there were 3 major entries into this stand over the last 200 years. There were probably many other smaller entries by the farm family that lived here, seeking firewood or timber, but the amounts that a family needs doesn’t quickly transform a forest stand in the same way that a major commercial cut does. These three entries, combined, had the effect of harvesting nearly every tree worth the effort of cutting down, leaving the middle aged second-growth forest that we have today.

Entry 1 – Mid 1800s. White and red pine logging. It is known that this region had a lot of mature pine, and our forest was no exception (we are back to many 90 to 100 year old pines today). When they came through in the mid-1800s, they probably cut and floated down the river every large high quality pine they could get to.

Entry 2 – 1930s. Soft-wood logging at the time of the dam completion. When the dam was completed, it brought the reservoir to the very edge of this forest stand. Today’s forest on this site is around 90 years old, which coincides precisely with the flooding of the lake. This would also have been something like 70 to 90 years after the first cut, meaning that the forest had largely regrown to sufficient size for harvest. My theory is that once the water arrived, the property owners went through and cut down all the trees that could be floated and had value at market, mainly white pine, white spruce, and balsam fir, perhaps some other species as well. They did a heavy enough cut at this time such that the canopy opened up and many new saplings grew in – these would become the primary component of the forest which is present today in 2025.

Entry 3 – 1950s. As was mentioned above, a bulldozer was used to build a new logging road into the area at this time. This was also soon after mechanized forest harvest became feasible, with skidding tractors and chainsaws becoming available and making timber harvesting much faster . My theory is that they did another pass through this forest, this time cutting down almost every remaining mature tree remaining on the site. They wouldn’t have bothered with any of the trees that originated during the 1930s, as these would still have been far too small to be of commercial interest. When they were done, what was left was a young forest, with most trees similar in age, 20 to 30 years old at that time.

After this heavy cut in the 1950s, there was essentially zero valuable timber available for decades. It would be about 50 years before even the fastest growing trees, the aspen, would be ready for a thinning cut (in 2008). And that brings us to today where we are starting a second thinning cut, one that will set up this forest to grow for a few more decades with higher quality and longer-lived trees. I’m sure that it was not done intentionally, but the establishment of this forest is very similar to the silvicultural practice of a ‘shelterwood cut’. A shelterwood cut begins with an ‘establishment cut’, which opens up the canopy and allows new trees to begin to grow. The remaining large trees also ‘shelter’ the new forest, giving dappled shade, wind protection, and providing a good source of seed. Then, once the new generation has established itself, a ‘removal cut’ takes off the rest of the mature trees, leaving behind a young even aged forest. Fast forward a few decades, and that is the forest I’m working in today.

This short history that I’ve told above does match with all the evidence that I have about past land use on the property, and is in line with what was done elsewhere in the region – this is a relatively typical story of what people have tended to do when they move into these areas. The pressures that were on the loggers, settlers, and farmers led them to cut everything that technology and markets allowed to try to scratch out a living from this land. There are only a few more small facts about the property’s management that I don’t yet have an explanation for. Chief among these is that there are a few scattered red oaks, sugar maples, and even one beautiful yellow birch, that clearly are much older than the surrounding forest. And these are quality trees still today, straight and healthy. They look like they must have been big enough in that 1950s cut to be commercially valuable, and yet they were left behind. So either these trees are incredibly vigorous and younger than I think, or they were intentionally left behind. My forester told me that there was little market for red oaks decades ago, so perhaps that explains the oaks. Or maybe they were left behind for some other reason by the landowner. Perhaps scattered trees were left intentionally as a seed source for the forest to regenerate. Regardless, it is nice to see these few bigger and older trees still out there on the land.

I, like many other woodlot owners, have thought about the ways in which I could make a living from my forested property. I always am looking for more reasons to spend time outside and in the woods, and enjoy it when I am doing something productive. One way, but certainly not the only way, of being productive is to be earning some money. So this piece is just a first rough look at what it entails to run a small forest-based business off of a woodlot.

Firewood business

So a first obvious business that one can run out of their forest is selling firewood. Someone who owns a bigger forested property is likely to already have many of the tools needed to run a firewood business. From talking to some of the local firewood sellers in my area, I put together a first pass at what the numbers look like for the value of a face cord of wood, a stack of wood 4′ tall, 8′ long, cut so that the pieces are 16″ deep (which is 1/3 of a ‘full’ cord).

Making and selling a face cord	Value of this step	Cumulative value of the wood
Standing tree (stumpage) value	$10	$10
Cut and skidded to landing	$25	$35
Delivered to log buyer	$20	$55
Bucked and split into firewood	$30	$85
Stacked/stored for drying 6 months	$10	$95
Time for marketing/sales/logistics	$15	$110
Delivery to customer	$30	$140

As you can see, the top number, of a customer paying $140 per cord, sounds pretty good. But each step along the way requires equipment and time. If you’re only cutting for personal use, less than 10 cords a year, you can get away with just a chainsaw, pickup, and splitting axe. Even that amount really strains what someone is able and willing to do with that kind of equipment.

Let’s instead imagine that we are on the scale of a 100 to a few hundred cords a year, so something like $15,000 to $60,000 of revenue. To achieve something like that, you start to need some commercial-level equipment. First, you need a couple of good quality chainsaws and various safety and maintenance equipment. Then once the trees are cut, you need something to haul them out of the woods, like a forestry trailer, a skidding winch on a tractor, or a dedicated skidder. In our area, the more serious cutters all have decades-old skidders, which work well but require that the owner is a mechanic as well as an operator. Then you would need a quality gas-powered splitter, perhaps even one of the bigger processing machines that cut and split automatically all in one pass. Then a tractor or other machine is needed for moving and handling all that wood. Finally one has to do delivery, which generally is handled in our area by a heavy-duty pickup pulling a big hydraulic dump trailer behind it. At minimum, this is a few tens of thousands of dollars worth of equipment. If you buy bigger/newer/more equipment, it is entirely possible to have a couple hundred thousand dollars worth of machinery and gear. Whether you take out loans or tie up your cash by buying equipment straight-up, there are significant carrying costs to having all this equipment.

If you have some version of all of the equipment above, you can run your firewood business from standing trees to delivered wood. Which is great, but then this also requires a lot of working time. And when we’re talking about making a living, we can boil that all down to dollars earned per hour spent. From one friend that runs this kind of business, he says that he ends up making around $30 to $40 per hour, but I have a feeling that he isn’t truly including all of his costs and time. So lets say that it ends up being something like $30 per hour, and that is not easy work.

Lumber business

Cutting lumber from logs ends up looking relatively similar to cutting firewood. I don’t have numbers to break it down as precisely as for firewood, but I’ll lay it out in broad strokes. The first steps, everything up to logs delivered to the mill, looks pretty similar to firewood production. The biggest difference is that the standing, living trees that can be turned into good lumber are worth quite a bit more than trees that are only good for firewood (see here for more about value of trees). Once you have logs at your mill, the steps are a bit different:

• Milling – cut logs into boards. Requires a sawmill. At the smaller scales, most people use some form of a portable bandsaw mill (like a Wood-mizer or one of the many other brands).
• Drying – Most commercial wood is dried to have a low moisture content, which also helps to reduce how much the wood ‘moves’ once built into something. Some building can be done with wet or ‘green’ wood.
• Planing – A machine called a planer takes a small layer off the outside of the boards to make them smooth. Again, this doesn’t always need to be done, but it is for almost all commercial wood being sold.

Then finally comes the selling. And here is by far the hardest part of a small milling business. For firewood, there isn’t really competition from big companies, but for lumber, there is immense competition. If you are going to sell lumber, you need to get people to come to you instead of big lumberyards and hardware stores. For typical dimensioned wood, like 2x4s, one can’t really compete at all. If one is instead selling wood that is in unusual sizes or from unusual species, you won’t have much competition, but you also are unlikely to have a large market. So be very careful about starting this kind of business unless you have your sales and marketing really figured out, it is probably the hardest part of this kind of wood business.

Maple syrup business

Finally, maple syrup, such a classic product of our region, and the northeastern maple forests in Ontario, Quebec, and New England. Just like the other two options above, yes, one can make some money doing it, but no, it is not easy.

To do the ‘backyard hobbyist’ version of making syrup, it doesn’t take too much in time or expenses. All you need is a few maple trees, a drill, a few sap collecting buckets, and a big burner on which to boil the sap down into syrup. If you are doing it just to make one or two litres of syrup, it can be a great way to spend a weekend or two in the wet part of late winter or early spring. Keep in mind, however, that if you were to count your time even at minimum wage, this would be the most expensive syrup you will ever eat.

If you want to make it a business, you have to go bigger, much bigger. And you need to invest many thousands of dollars in all sorts of equipment that will allow you to collect and store syrup from many trees, as well as other equipment that allows you to extract the sugar from all that sap. In modern systems, they use tubing with vacuum suction to collect sap, reverse osmosis filters to remove much of the water from that sap, and very large and efficient evaporators to finish making sap into syrup. Once you have the syrup, you then need further equipment to be able to load it into bottles and cans in a sanitary fashion.

Again, just like with the lumber business, your product is going to be a commodity that is very similar to the syrup produced at all the other sugar shacks. So marketing and sales is again going to potentially be a huge problem. Quebec solves this problem for bigger producers by having a cooperative model, where all larger producers sell to the coop at a set wholesale price, and the coop takes care of all the distribution, sales, marketing, export, etc. It works well, but it means that the producer gets a much smaller income from each liter of syrup sold. You can also sell it yourself, but then you are in the retail food sales business, which is a whole lot of work in itself.

I’m not going to try to go into the exact numbers and economics of the syrup business, other than to offer up a rule of thumb that I have often heard repeated. That rule is that it takes a minimum of 1000 to 2000 taps to reach the economy of scale where one can earn enough income to justify the expenses. Below that, you may be able to cover the cost of your equipment, but you will end up working for free. Above that, it begins to become possible to have a viable business. I have helped out a friend of mine who has about a 4000 tap maple business, and have toured another that is close to 20,000 taps. Both of these are successful, but I can tell you that they work hard for their livelihood.

Other non-timber forest products

Finally, forests have many other things going on in them than timber and syrup. There are medicinal and edible wild plants and fungi, animals that can be hunted (or watched such as by birders), one can make crafts out of branches, wreaths, baskets, and much more. I can tell you straight out that very few of these really pencil out well as businesses, and even fewer scale beyond a single individual with a passion. There are all sorts of activities in the forest that I and many others partake of, but they are mostly destined to remain passions and hobbies. I have seen a great many articles or short films about people making these kinds of things into businesses, but it is just incredibly difficult to compete against modern industry. If you’re talking about food, if you only had to pay minimum wage for the time that it takes to go and gather a wild food, that food is already going to be far more expensive than an analogue that is raised on a farm automated by tractors and other equipment.

So please, do go out and enjoy your time in the woods, but be very careful before you conclude that you are going to make some money for your time out there.

Every lake and river in this region has a human history. I know that the Gatineau River was used for thousands of years as highway of sorts by native peoples to travel to their hunting grounds, but I really don’t know much of that story. I know more of the European story of this river, and particularly the time since the Paugan dam turned our section of the river into a lake. I just want to share a few notes about that.

The Manitou (our property) is located along a reservoir of the Gatineau River. About 10 kilometres downstream from us is the Paugan Dam, which creates the more lake-like environment that we enjoy. To the north of us is Lac Sainte Marie, a lake (and associated village) that is just next to the tallest local ski mountain, Mont Sainte Marie. There is flat and navigable water from the dam for the 20 kilometres up to Lac Sainte Marie, as well as up the main river channel all the way past the town of Gracefield. Eventually you reach impassible rapids as you proceed north in the river. Public boat launches can be found near the dam and in Lac Sainte Marie.

The Manitou is halfway up the main reservoir, with our house on the west side of the river facing out on Manitou Bay (the namesake for our property). As our property is a peninsula, we also have shoreline on the eastern extent of the Manitou, which fronts the old river channel. I don’t believe that there actually is a name that captures the entirety of the reservoir, there are just several named lakes and bays. Lac Sainte Marie is the northern end, the Paugan Reservoir is the lake-like area at the southern end, with Manitou Bay halfway between them. The rest of the reservoir is seemingly unnamed. Manitou Bay is over 100 hectares in size, and prior to the dam being built, it was a wooded valley with the only water being a few small streams and swamps that wandered towards the Gatineau River. Manitou Bay is a wonderful little lake, with about 30 homes and cottages built along its shores. There are still a fair number of trees sticking out of the water from those earlier times, which does wonders for keeping water skiers and jet skis out of our part of the reservoir, and we do appreciate the peace and quiet.

History – If you want to know about the history of the river, the dam, and the local communities, there is a wealth of knowledge available from the Gatineau Valley Historical Society. For someone who enjoys local history, it is very easy to spend hours digging through all that they have available there. I will give just a bit of that history here.

Starting in the early 1800s, loggers worked their way far up the Gatineau River, focusing first on cutting white pines. They floated the logs down the river, but struggled with some of the rapids and waterfalls. A series of dams were built in the early 1900s, with our reservoir being impounded by the Paugan Dam, which was completed in 1932 by Gatineau Power Company, and was nationalized to become part of Hydro-Québec in 1963. By the time the dam was built, most of the white pines were gone, and the floating logs had switched much more to balsam fir and spruce. Damming our reservoir then accomplished two things. The primary reason was hydroelectricity, with the Paugan Dam generating 216 megawatts, enough to power somewhere around 100,000 homes. The secondary reason was to make running logs down the river easier. Log driving continued all the way until the early 1990s, and with all the wood floating in the river, it depressed tourism and cottage development because of the safety and navigation issues associated with all of those logs.

Fishing – As with many other lakes and rivers throughout the Outaouais, there is good fishing throughout the reservoir. The primary species targeted are walleye, northern pike, smallmouth and largemouth bass. Also present, but less popular with anglers are catfish, sunfish, sturgeon, and more.

Land ownership along the reservoir – and the lost camping sites – Until just a few years ago, Hydro-Quebec owned a great deal of the shoreline and almost all of the islands throughout the reservoir. This was a holdover from when the reservoir was originally flooded, where Gatineau Power purchased and/or expropriated all of the land that was going to be flooded when the dam was built. Surveyors marked everything that they thought would flood, and the Gatineau Power Company bought it all up. This meant that they ended up owning all the islands and a lot of the shoreline after flooding. My best understanding is that Gatineau Power, and Hydro-Quebec after them, essentially ignored all this property for close to 100 years. By the time we arrived to the area in 2011, there was a strong tradition of using all those islands as free campsites accessible by boats, canoes, and kayaks. Everything changed in the last few years, as Hydro-Quebec has now sold all of that property. Much of it went to the landowners who were immediately adjacent to the Hydro-Quebec properties (we were the beneficiaries of this, purchasing an additional 80 acres to add to the Manitou), while other parcels and islands were sold through public auction. As of the time I’m writing this in early 2025, I believe that all property along the reservoir is now private, and campers without permission from the new owners are now considered to be trespassing. It is a big change for those using the lake, and in many ways it is unfortunate to lose this common good.

Continuing development – As mentioned above, I’m fairly sure that the reason that there isn’t even more recreation on our reservoir is due to the extended history of log running. This made it difficult and dangerous to boat recreationally. However, more and more the reservoir is becoming developed as a part of cottage country. When we arrived in 2011, there were about 25 cottages in Manitou Bay. Counting our own place, there are now closer to 35, with most of the new construction being full-time homes rather than just cottages. It is similar throughout the reservoir. I think that when we originally arrived, there were approximately 200 waterfront homes and cottages, and there are perhaps 3 or 4 new places being built each year for the last decade. We’ll have to see what the future brings, but we can expect that more and more of the areas that could be easily developed will be.

For those of you who have recreated on our lake or otherwise have a connection to the Gatineau River, there may be a few bits of information above that are new to you. And if you don’t know this place in particular, this can instead act as a stand-in for the story of a local body of water in your neck of the woods. Each place has its own story to tell, and it is always interesting to get a deeper notion of the history of the places you inhabit. If you don’t know your own local stories, go to find them. Ask older local people, consult old newspapers and government records, tie the present to the past.

So I received our completed forestry plans in September and have now found the time to put them up here. These maps and descriptions are all about assembling a clear picture of the trees growing on our properties – what is their size, species, number, and health. There is also some information about soil, slope, and characteristics related to wildlife and regeneration. In addition to telling us what is there, there are also recommendations for what the foresters suggest we do each section of the forest. As this is timber focused, those recommendations are about what kind of harvest to do and when it ought to be done. Over the next few years, we will implement many of these recommendations, which should allow us to improve forest and ecosystem health while also producing wood products and putting a few dollars into our pockets.

For forestry, a property is divided up into ‘stands’. Each stand includes a region that shares similarities – same tree species and size, soil types, harvest history, etc. Then when there are major differences (moving from a mature sugar bush to a young stand of aspen), one moves into another stand. Our foresters decided to break up our property into 26 stands based on those similarities and differences. This certainly isn’t the only definitive way to parse the property, but gives a great first pass on what kind of forests we have.

There are two unfortunate things for my readers about these documents. One is that due to some quirks about the official ownership of our property (the official owners aren’t exactly the same for the whole property), our plan had to be assembled in two pieces. One portion is 75 acres and includes our house. The other portion is approximately 160 acres, and about half of that land we acquired from the power utility in 2023. The other unfortunate thing for non-speakers is that these plans are written in French. Our property is in Quebec, and so almost all official documentation is produced only in French. I can sort through things like these documents well enough, but it may be a bit harder for many of you. With a bit of help from a translation tool, you would be able to sort out the main details. Each page is for one stand, and the format for each of them is the same, showing species composition, tree density and average size, as well as a stand-specific recommendation.

For the time being, I’m going to present these plans here with no further commentary. As we plan and conduct operations within our forest, we will refer back to these plans and you will hear more about them.

Images – As you should be able to see in the images, these two parcels fit together neatly to make something that we treat as a single property. If I had a bit more photo editing skill, I’d stitch them together into a single image – I’ll get to that at some point.

Management-plan-farm-owned_for-website

Management-plan-with-house_for-website

I love maps. And one thing that I really enjoy is looking at maps of our property, and thinking about what it is like in that exact place. If I imagine standing in that spot in the forest in person and looking around – can I see all the same features that show up on different kinds of maps? What can I learn from looking at the map that I couldn’t see in person? What can I see in person that doesn’t show up on any map? In over ten years of being on the Manitou property, I’d like to think that I’ve gotten to know just about every inch of it, but I still am learning new things when I look at high-detail maps like the three that I’ve included below. I will go through these different types of maps and highlight some of the most important things that I can glean from digging into them – you can do the same for a property that you care about.

We really are in a golden age for mapping our landscape, as all 3 of these maps are really only possible through very high precision photography from satellites and LiDAR. In the past, you could put together the same kind of information with massive effort on the ground, but it never would have been available for the average landowner. Our property is, in the grand scheme of things, a pretty unremarkable rural area an hour from the nearest city, and yet I still have incredibly precise and detailed information at my fingertips.

To get the full effect from these maps, consider opening them in their own page to really zoom in on the details.

Satellite camera maps

Many people have become much more familiar with satellite maps through tools like Google Maps. These are taken with high quality cameras with good zoom lenses pointed at the earth from satellites in space. The photo below is the latest imagery available of our land in Google Earth, with this photo taken earlier this year, in June of 2024.

When thinking about forest and land management, there is an awful lot that can be seen from this satellite view. The broad details are the first thing that catches your eye, the roads, the fields (in lightest green), the dark blue of the reservoir, and you can even see our house towards the upper left at the end of the road. But if you start to look a bit closer at the forest, you can see more.

In the left centre (just to the right and below the house), you can see a patch of lighter, brighter green. These are sugar maple trees, and the lightest green patches are where the maples most dominate the tree canopy. The darkest patches of green in other areas are either aspen trees or conifers. The mid-color greens are usually other leafy species like oak and birch. If you zoom into the photo (and this is much more powerful if you are directly in the Google Earth application), you can also see the size and shape of the individual tree canopies. In some areas they are small and tightly packed, whereas in others they are relatively large and round. The tightly packed trees are either younger, or of species that really grow up with very tight spacing, like balsam fir trees.

If you continue to learn how to read the map, you can also see features like the swampy areas and the creek that connects them together. If you look over the forest, you can pick out a few small grey/brown patches, which are rocky outcrops at the top of some of the taller hills on the property. If you are working with a property that you would like to get to know better, the best thing that I can suggest is to spend a day exploring it in person, and then come back to the map that night or the next day to see if you can find all those same features that you walked through on your maps.

Topographic maps

Most topographic maps that I’ve seen have elevation lines superimposed on a picture of a property that shows details like roads and waterways. The lines may be labeled with elevation numbers, say every 10 meters. I never was able to find a version of one of these maps that had enough detail to be useful for me – our property was never anyone’s priority for making a precise topographic map. But now, again with the wonders of modern imagery, I now have a picture of every wrinkle on our landscape. The image below was captured with LiDAR. An airplane shoots lasers at the earth, and then has a sensor to see how long it takes for the laser light to bounce back. Do a bunch of math on many measurements, and you can make the incredibly detailed map seen below. I created this map using the web application for ArcGIS (a basic account was free), accessing a topography map available within the program. You can see that this map shows topography with shadowing instead of elevation lines, with darker shadows indicating steeper terrain, and lighter colours showing flat areas.

The terrain matters in some forests more than others. Where I grew up in Minnesota, there is only lightly rolling terrain, but here at the Manitou, we are truly in hill country. Lots of ups and downs, with some of them very steep. Almost of it can be traversed on foot, but one has to be very judicious about where to place trails and roads that vehicles would pass on.

Hills – So what can we see here, and how does it matter for my forest management? The first thing that can be seen is all the darkest shadows, which are the steepest terrain. These areas are going to be impassible with vehicles, and on this property usually include a lot of small exposed rock cliffs. These areas have little soil and tend to grow smaller trees, making them less a part of any commercial work we may do (but they can be great for biodiversity). The next thing to notice is the very ‘wrinkly’ terrain, see the oval shaped hill on the bottom left as the best example. The more wrinkles, the more you are seeing exposed bedrock, or bedrock with very little soil on it. So that hill in the bottom left corner is relatively tall, and is very rocky. It is one of the best places to go hiking (including a wonderful lookout where you can see many miles), but we will mostly leave this area alone in our management. Some of the ‘medium’ coloured areas are sloping terrain with deeper soil. These areas can be great for growing trees. The tops of these hills can favour species that can tolerate dryness like red oak, and these slopes are exactly what sugar maple likes to grow on. For our forestry work, almost all of our efforts will end up working with these medium slopes as well as the flatter areas.

Some of the flattest areas (mostly white), are where clearings were made by the earliest settlers of our property for farm fields. Compare this topography map with the satellite map above, and you’ll see that the fields are some of the flattest terrain on the property. Our property was never very well suited to agriculture and no one would dream of making fields here today, as even the best spots are too hilly, small and infertile to achieve economically viable agricultural yields.

Hydrology – You can also see some of the hydrology on this map. Towards the upper left, you can see a very skinny finger of water reaching into the land. This is an old stream bed from the time before the reservoir was flooded. Follow that finger down and to the right, and you can see a very ‘white’ area, which is currently a couple acres of swamp with a small stream running through it. Continue down and to the right, and you can see the creek winding its way up the valley. Towards the bottom-centre, the creek crosses the road, before the valley turns to the east, and then northeast. The creek ends with a small ‘V’ shape, which is where there are two springs that bubble up from the ground.

Trails – Some trails and roads can also be seen. The main road is marked, but there are a few more roads that can be seen in the image. The clearest is seen forking off the main road towards the upper left. It splits towards the north, angling to the very tip of the smaller peninsula in the upper left. It ends in a sort of circle, which is a clearing made for a campsite. That sliver of land above the blue line is a lake lot owned by a neighbor, and they keep a camping trailer and gear there at this site.

As we intend to keep our land as a working forest, we need to build and maintain good trails. The main criteria for us are to build trails that: get us to all corners of the property, stay dry, and are as flat as possible. Once we know roughly where we want to go, looking at the map to find the lightest color paths from one area to the next can show us the potential paths with the least slope. Most of the existing roads and trails already follow paths like this, but we need a few more to get to areas currently inaccessible to vehicles. I would like to be able to take our utility tractor to haul logs in the woods, so trails cannot be too steep or rough. I have actually used this very map to find likely paths through the east end of the property, where there are currently no trails at all. I’ve found the most likely paths on the map, and followed that up by walking them in person. I think that I now have the trails mostly planned, and will write about putting those in as I go along.

Canopy height maps

The final map is one that is new to me this fall, a tree canopy height map. I actually don’t know how to access this kind of map directly, but my forester Antoine at Terra Bois was kind enough to share this map with me. This map was also created with LiDAR, just like the topography map above. Interestingly, LiDAR can also be sensitive enough to tell when it is passing through trees, and even to measure their height. So this map shows the height of the trees, pixel by pixel, throughout the whole map.

So this map tells me an awful lot about the trees growing at the Manitou. I’ve spent enough time on the land in person that I already know quite a bit about what trees are in each area, but this map makes it so much more precise. I had only the roughest idea of how tall the trees were in any given area – I knew which ones were really big, but it can be much harder to differentiate the middle-sized trees. From the heights shown in this map, I can see and differentiate a lot about the topography and soil, the species of trees, and the age of the trees. This isn’t from looking at this map alone, but instead by combining what I know from other maps like those above, as well as from all the time I’ve spent around the site.

Tall white pines on the east end

The first thing that I see in this map is where the tallest trees are, those in maroon and red. You can see that the main concentration of red is in an area at the east end of the property (the right side). Most of these red blotches are patches of eastern white pine, which is by far the largest tree that grows in our region. And these ones are old and tall, as this part of the property has not seen any forest management for over 100 years. This area was probably logged in the early to mid 1800s, and then perhaps again around 1920 before it was purchased by the power utility that flooded our reservoir. They never did any management since, and we purchased this parcel from the utility, Hydro-Quebec, in 2023. That same area with all the red, also has a lot of trees in the blue and green range, or 17 to 26 meters tall. These are mostly mature and older trees. If you cross the horizontal black line to the north, you pass onto the neighbours’ property. It goes from tall reds/blues/greens, to mostly pinks, which are much shorter. The soil is the same there, but the neighbor had a clear cut on their side in the 1980s. So there are hardly any bigger older trees left on their side. And if you continue west (left) from our patch of tallest trees, you cross a vertical black line (that becomes red below). This is moving from the power utility land onto the farm we originally purchased. Again, crossing that line one goes to much smaller trees, mostly in pinks and yellows. My understanding is that the area to the west had a heavy commercial cut in the 1950s, and continued to be cut for firewood in the years since.

On the last (south and west /bottom and left) side of our tallest trees, it is again mostly shorter (pinks and yellows), with scattered taller trees (green and blue). I have some ideas of why there is such a stark difference, but have more to learn. Neither area has been logged, so that isn’t the difference. I do know that this area with shorter trees experienced a tornado in 2013. There are a lot of trees still tipped over there, but I wouldn’t have thought that could explain it all. Towards the south there is a large rocky ridge. Tree species also matter – more to the west there are a lot of aspen, balsam fir and ironwood, and the latter two don’t grow very tall. So I’ll have to do some more looking around at this transition in person to sort out the differences.

Rocky hilltops and steep shorelines

The next thing that I notice is all of the areas with the shortest canopy, shown in grey, yellow and tan. I have been in all of these spots, and they all are one of two things: rocky dry hilltops or steep hillsides. The interior patches of yellow/brown/grey are all the dry and rocky hilltops. I’m actually quite surprised at how apparent they are once I know to look for them. I’m actually quite sure that all of the shortest canopy spots (greys and yellow) are in fact the very tops of the hills. From thousands of years of rain, all of the soil that forms constantly washes downhill from these peaks, leaving very little fertility to grow trees of any size. I think that this picks out the rocky hilltops just about as well as the topographic map above. The other area with lots of yellows and tans are the shorelines. On both the east and west sides of the Manitou, there are steep rocky slopes where the land meets the water. Most of these spots are dominated by small and crowded balsam fir, which never do get particularly tall.

The sugarbush

In the middle of the western area of the property, there is a big patch of greens and blues (quite tall at 17 to 26 meters), starting near the house and going south to the property line. Most of this is one long hill/ridge that goes mostly north to south, and has medium slopes and good soil and fertility – you can see this ridge very well on the topographic map above. This area was cut heavily in the 1950s and left to grow back since then. This is perfect maple growing territory, and almost half the trees here are sugar maple. Most of the rest are shorter-lived more sun loving species like aspen and white birch. Most of the tallest (blue areas and splashes of red) trees are Bigtooth Aspen, which at 80 to 90 years old are at their peak size – some of them have started tipping over from old age already. This is where we will actually start our work, favouring the maples and other longer lived species, turning white birch, ironwood and low quality maple into firewood, with the aspen probably headed to a nearby mill.

The rest

So what does that leave us with? Most of the rest of the property not yet discussed above is the mid-height areas predominated by the pink colours (12 to 17 meters in height). There is a great deal of pink in the central section of the property, and my best guess as to why is that this was more heavily harvested somewhat recently, perhaps 40 years ago. This was the area used most heavily by the family of farmers that owned our property for over 100 years before we purchased it, and it was easily accessible for firewood or timber. There aren’t many cut stumps visible, so those have all rotted away, but the majority of trees are on the younger/smaller side. For this area, we primarily need to wait for the trees to continue to grow.

The other pink areas that haven’t been heavily cut in recent decades are instead a variety of other lower quality sites. Without trying to point out each individual section, I can see a few spots that I know are on waterlogged terrain, which reduces the number of species that can thrive and can impede tree growth. Some other pink areas can be found near the shores of the reservoir, where steeper slopes and thin soils reduce the ability of trees to grow tall.

So it is now widely accepted that climate change is a serious problem in the world, but we are still figuring out the details about how to fix it. One major possibility that I discussed at length in the past here at Sunshine Saved is to reduce those activities that cause climate change, especially our consumption of goods and services that burn fossil fuels. The primer that I wrote on what a given family could do can be seen here. Then there are things that we can do to take greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere, broadly called ‘carbon sequestration’. There are currently many high tech proposals for factories that will do ‘carbon capture’, but I have yet to see one of these that has any chance of scaling up or being economically or energy efficient enough to accomplish much. I think that the current high-tech proposals will never go past ‘demonstrations’, and won’t actually help the problem. Perhaps next-generation high-tech carbon sequestration will be better. Finally there are ‘nature-based’ solutions, which is what I’ll be talking about for the rest of this post. All of these are basically about getting plants to do the work for us, to take carbon out of the atmosphere and store it somewhere that won’t quickly go back into the air. One of the many reasons that I started our farm, Ferme L’eau du ruisseau, was to do something tangible towards helping out the climate change and biodiversity crises that the world is now facing. While our efforts in farming continue, it turns out that managing forests holds much more promise for fighting climate change than farming could (at least in our region). This is because the primary chemical component of all parts of a tree is in fact carbon, and forests grow a lot of trees. And where does any plant get the carbon it needs to grow? It pulls it straight out of the air.

Agriclimat conference

In November of 2023 I had the pleasure of attending a conference put on by Agriclimat, a Quebec initiative to address climate change through farms and farmers. The full day conference was put on to educate a group of farmers about how farms connect to climate change and greenhouse gas emissions. It was wonderfully informative, and I took a lot of notes about the particulars, especially those that related to forests. On average, about 1/3 of each Quebec farm is forested, and in the Gatineau Hills where our properties are located, that number may more like 3/4 forested, which is about what our own properties are. So farmers in Quebec and elsewhere manage an enormous amount of forests, and everyone would like that to be good management. I’d like to share with you a bunch of the numbers about carbon and forests that I learned there. Unfortunately I don’t have the original sources of these data, but found a similar US source on forest carbon (pdf embedded below). The specific numbers between these two sources differ somewhat, but the basic story is exactly the same.

Sequestration rates.
Fact number one is that forests sequester a lot of carbon. Each hectare of forest sequesters about 1.75 tons of CO2 per year. This is for a middle aged forest with mostly 80 to 100 year old trees, which is typical of enormous swaths of southeastern Canada and the northeastern US. In old forests, say those around 200 years old and older, sequestration tapers off and reaches an equilibrium because the amount of carbon being sequestered matches the amount being emitted from dying trees, decomposing logs and other woody material on the forest floor. Those old forests do store an enormous amount of carbon, but the total amount being added doesn’t keep going up forever.

Something that was outside the scope of the conference was how different forest management practices may change those rates. If one uses really poor management, would the rate go down? With great management, would the rate go up? Looking at other types of forest outcomes, the difference between ‘managed’ and ‘unmanaged’ often seems to be about a factor of 2. Unmanaged forests produce about half as much timber as managed forests. While I don’t have definitive numbers, I imagine that it would be something roughly similar when one is managing for carbon storage – the right management may be able to roughly double the climate impact over no (or poor) management. I’ll be looking into these details further.

As a point of comparison, croplands in Quebec are on average releasing .5 tons of CO2 per hectare into the atmosphere each year. This is the opposite of sequestration, and is due to erosion, loss of soil carbon, and the fact that there is very little living plant matter making it through the winter season. Regenerative and organic farming techniques can do much better, keeping the soil living, healthy, and storing much more organic matter, but they can’t match forests. We need food and must continue to adopt great agricultural practices, but they aren’t going to solve the problem all alone.

How much total carbon and where is it?
So if a forest is sequestering close to two tons of CO2 per hectare each year, where does it all go in that forest? It turns out that there are three big pools. In that average 80 year old Quebec forest, there would be about 80 tons per hectare of living trees, the majority in the trunks, with the rest in the branches and roots. Then there would be about 25 tons per hectare of dead woody material, in logs and branches on the forest floor, as well as standing dead trees (snags). Finally, there would be about 150 tons of carbon per acre of carbon in the soil, known as ‘soil organic carbon’*** . This is in very small pieces, many of which are even microscopic. This soil carbon is integral to all of the microorganisms that live in the soil. All told, this is about 250 tons of carbon stored per hectare of forest. If that forest reaches old age (200 years or more), the total carbon storage may max out somewhere around 400 tons per hectare.

Disturbances and loss of forest carbon
So forests build up and hold a lot of carbon, but it’s not there forever. When there are major disturbances that kill a lot of trees, carbon can be released to the atmosphere. This is different from fossil fuel reserves buried deep underground, which would stay there for millions of years without our intervention. But forests are living systems that are always in flux, generally storing carbon for tens or hundreds of years, perhaps even thousands when circumstances are right. Natural disturbances that kill or damage trees and include fires, ice storms, wind events, floods, insect infestations, bacterial or fungal disease, and more. These kinds of events can kill some or even most of the trees in a given area, and when dead trees decompose, much of the carbon within them goes right back into the atmosphere. Then there are land use conversions, changing forest to other things like agricultural fields, roads, houses, etc. These generally wipe out the majority of the carbon store, and almost no other land use would be as effective at combatting climate change as maintaining forests.

A different kind of forest disturbance can actually help fight climate change. While counterintuitive, harvest/logging is a type of disturbance that can potentially fight climate change. This isn’t just any logging, but rather doing the right kinds of harvests in the right kinds of places. There are certain areas that should stay untouched, such as the few remaining old growth forests, and others that need the just right kind of management. While there are too many details to get into here, good management maintains a healthy forest and protects biodiversity, while also giving us wood products.

So how can logging help? Harvesting wood helps people to fight against climate change in two main ways. The more important of them is that using wood to meet human needs almost always uses less energy and creates less emissions than the alternative. We are going to want buildings, and packaging, and insulation, and so many more goods, and if we don’t use wood we will instead have to use more steel, concrete, plastics, or other products. If we assume that we are going to want those goods anyway, it is most often better to use wood products. There is a whole field of study called ‘lifecycle emissions’ that looks at these sorts of comparisons, and data is available out there to actually compare product by product. The second way that harvesting wood can help is with carbon storage directly in wood products. A board that goes into a house may stay there for 100 years or more, and all the carbon will stay sequestered inside that house as long as it stands. The Agriclimat conference gave a few key comparisons about these effects.

Product	Sequestration time – average	Tons of CO2 reduction by using one ton wood instead of other materials
Firewood	1 year	.4 tons (from fossil fuel heating)
Paper products	2 years	not available
Boards – construction lumber	35 years	.9 tons (from steel, concrete, etc.)
Paneling – plywood, particle board, etc.	25 years	.8 tons (composites, plastics, etc.)

So in reading this table, by using wood to do construction instead of steel and concrete, for every one ton of construction lumber you build with, you have almost a ton of reduced emissions as compared with making that same building with products like steel and concrete. There are of course some emissions associated with cutting trees, transporting them, cutting them into boards, etc., but this is far less than for other materials one could use. So generally, wood is good.

But one still has to take this with a grain of salt, as this is broad-scale averages and doesn’t apply in every single situation. For example, residential heating with wood. If one is taking low-quality locally harvested trees and burning them for heat in homes that would otherwise be heated using oil or propane, that is a great thing. But if instead of wood burning, you heat your home with a heat pump using clean electricity (there is a lot of hydropower in Quebec), wood burning doesn’t look so good. And when it comes to the wood pellet electricity generating plants, the massive harvesting of wood used to burn for electricity is far worse than renewables like solar and wind. There is always nuance, but using wood instead of alternative high emissions products and energy sources is a wise choice.

So how much can we actually accomplish at the Manitou?

Our own forests at the Manitou and Ferme L’eau du ruisseau add up to 144 hectares of forest of mostly middle-aged forest, so are sequestering about 250 tons of CO2 per year. How far does that forest go towards off-setting the carbon emissions of my family? Or those of my neighbours?

In 2019, the Canadian emissions per person was 15 tons CO2/year. Some of that is personal consumption, but a big portion is also each person’s share of government, industry, commercial, agriculture, shipping and the rest. As was mentioned above, each hectare of forest sequesters 1.75 tons CO2/year, which means each person needs 8 hectares of growing forests to soak up their share of emissions. Put another way, these 8 hectares would hold something like 1000 good-sized trees (25 cm diameter trunks or more) plus all the smaller trees and the understory. Each of those larger trees would then be pulling an average of 15kg of CO2 from the atmosphere each year. That really isn’t a lot for each tree, but since Canada has over 300 million hectares of forest, it really does add up.

My own family includes 2 adults and 3 small children. For the sake of argument, say that we are equal to 4 adults, or 60 tons CO2/year. So with our forests sequestering around 250 tons C02 per year, our forests will fully off-set the emissions of 4 families like my own. Making sure that this forest is cared for properly will have a bigger effect than almost anything else that our family could do in our personal lives – compared to taking less plane flights, living in a smaller more efficient house, giving up a car, etc. This is still just a drop in the bucket compared to the scale of the problem, but this is something that we can directly do, and it won’t cost us anything. Good management of our forests will even bring in a few dollars while we also accomplish a bit of greater good.

The last thing to mention is going to be about the details of doing forest management right. I’ll have much more to say about this in future posts. But the gist of it is that there is a really great balance that is achievable, where we will be able to protect our land and its biodiversity, while also sequestering carbon and producing economically valuable timber. This path isn’t necessarily an easy one since you must take all of these concerns into account at the same time, and find that sweet spot of actions to take. I’ll let you know how it goes.

Other reading

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*** Soil carbon limited by mineralization – This is completely an aside from the main story above, but it was a really interesting fact that I learned that same day of the conference and I just needed to share. This is about carbon mineralization, the process by which organic soil carbon is turned back into CO2 in the air. In the fight against climate change, we actually wish we could have much lower mineralization, to hold more carbon in the soil. It turns out that this mineralization is caused by soil micro-organisms that need both warmth and oxygen. Take away either of those, and more carbon stays in the ground. The most extreme cases are things like peat bogs – with no oxygen, there is almost no decomposition and they hold massive stores of organic materials (and therefore carbon). Cold boreal forests have higher rates of mineralization, but are still quite cool and have a ton of woody material on the surface and high percentage of carbon in the soil. As you go to temperate forests and then tropical forests, the mineralization gets faster and faster. Tropical soils therefore tend to have much lower soil organic carbon – microorganisms essentially eat it all and release it as CO2 very quickly. This also means that in the tropics, most of the carbon is actually stored in living trees and plants.

A warming climate will have an effect in Quebec on soil carbon. Warming will directly lead to more mineralization and more release of carbon from the soil to the atmosphere. As of 2020 data, the farms Agriclimat studied varied between 2.1% and 8.6% organic carbon in the top layers of soil. It is hard to quantify exactly, but those amounts will certainly go down as climate warms, giving one more headwind that we have to work against to reduce greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.