Master of Forest Conservation students head north for their annual Winter Field Tour
When the weather in the city is at its most frigid, master’s students in the Daniels Faculty’s forestry program head north, to parts of Ontario where the air is even colder. The Winter Field Tour is an annual tradition that has been happening for two decades. Master of Forest Conservation students go on a weekend-long trip that includes visits to research forests, lectures from forestry experts, and opportunities to relax and enjoy nature. Here are a few photos from this year’s outing.
The first stop was Huntsville, where students paid a visit to Westwind Forest Stewardship, a nonprofit that manages logging activity in a 1.3-million hectare swath of Crown land west of Algonquin Provincial Park. Here, Daniels students are learning about Westwind’s conservation efforts from forester Margaret Scott and senior forest technician Larry Jardine:
The students bunked for the weekend at the Canadian Ecology Centre, the home base of the Canadian Institute of Forestry. There, they attended lectures by experts like John Pineau, a “provincial leader” for the forest technology nonprofit FPInnovations:
The following day, the group went to Petawawa Research Forest, which is an open-air laboratory for research on trees and forests. In this photo, students are exploring “plot number one,” the oldest research plot in the forest, established in 1918. “The students learned a lot about what the forest looked like after going through different cycles of logging and different forest management,” says Tony Ung, a research technician in the Daniels forestry program:
Each night of the trip, there was a campfire back at the Canadian Ecology Centre. The person with the guitar in this photo is John Pineau, who sang folk songs about the history of the Mattawa River area, where the centre is located:
On the final day, the group made a trip to North Bay, where they visited Fur Harvesters Auction Inc., a facility where fur trappers and ranchers come to auction their goods. It was a chance to learn about Canada’s oldest forest industry:
And there was a (very expensive) polar bear rug:
