The Nova Scotia Forest Nutrient Budget Model surfaces

A slide presentation by NSDNR in June 2009 announced that a “Soil nutrient budget computer model–a decision support model to assess site suitability for biomass harvest in NS” was being developed by DNR contracting with UNB (University of New Brunswick) and it would be “Ready mid-2010”. To my knowledge, there has been nothing about the model on the NSDNR website since then, and it took a CBC Report to announce that a scientific paper on the model was published earlier this fall.

View CBC Report.

From my vantage point, the results given in the paper strongly reinforce the perspective that “our forests need a rest” as Bob Bancroft puts it. Some of my reasons for interpreting the paper this way are stated in the CBC report (I was one of several people interviewed); see also my comments on this web site under Calcium Depletion, last item.

Congratulations to the authors, led by Kevin Keys and Joshua Noseworthy, for publishing the paper in an open-access, peer reviewed scientific journal, and “showing us the science.”