News
A meeting of the Cedar Club held this week in Quebec City
24 April 2019
A Cedar Club meeting will be held this week at the Laurentian Forestry Center in Quebec City. This club brings together various actors related to the white cedar manufacturing industry. There are about 50 members mostly from Quebec and Maine, in the United States. It includes researchers from Laval University and the University of Maine.
Mr. Charles Tardif, Vice President Corporate Development and Procurement and shareholder at Maibec is one of the instigators of this group, which aims to encourage research on white cedar, and more specifically on the regeneration methods of this species.
The Cedar Club has produced more than two dozen scientific publications and has made numerous presentations to foresters, landowners, and other natural resource managers. In 2013, the Maine Society of American Foresters hosted a sold-out workshop on cedar management in northern Maine in which Cedar Club members presented their findings and discussed challenges faced by managers working with the cedar resource, including habitat management.
The culmination of their first decade of work, the Silvicultural Guide, is an invaluable resource forworking foresters, land managers, and ecologists. The work synthesizes existing knowledge and reports on new studies on regeneration, growth, mortality, site relationships, and responses to treatment. The Cedar Club’s recommendations include retaining and releasing white cedar in managed stands, and establishing and protecting advance regeneration and residual trees during harvesting. They suggest using a unique multiple-treatment approach for mixed-species stands, with deliberate management of the cedar.
The Cedar Club is a unique research partnership that includes scientists with many specialities from many academic and governmental institutions, non-governmental organizations, non-profits, and forest industries in both the United States and Canada. It grew from the actions of a few people who, realizing the need for more and accurate information about white-cedar, reached out to their colleagues and those concerned about this species and found that there was widespread interest in their work. By working together and collaborating with land managers from the start, the Cedar Club was able to provide immediate and effective assistance to those working « on the ground».