FSC® Forest Management · Program Public Summary
Program history
The tiles above are a snapshot: active means a woodlot whose signed FSC management plan is less than ten years old, as at 1 October 2026. Over its life the program has certified about 2.4 times that area, as plans lapse and members join and leave.
Counts every woodlot that has held an FSC management plan in effect — 959 signed today, 304 expired and 24 withdrawn. Area, volume and carbon are as recorded in WMS today for those 1,286 woodlots.
Program area
As at 1 October 2026 the certificate covers 569 active woodlots holding 41,519 hectares in total, of which 39,042 ha are FSC-certifiable — an average of 69 certified hectares each, concentrated in the East and on Cape Breton Island. The remaining 2,477 ha are uses that cannot be certified, chiefly agriculture. This is a snapshot of current membership, not every woodlot the program has worked with over its lifetime.
Forest composition
Natural forest and natural non-forest (bogs, barrens) are FSC-certifiable; non-natural uses such as agriculture and Christmas trees are not. This chart covers the 39,042 certifiable hectares; the remaining 2,477 ha, mostly agriculture, sit outside it.
FSC Principle 9
Following FSC Principle 9, member woodlots are screened for High Conservation Values against best-available provincial and federal data, confirmed in the field, and managed under value-specific strategies and monitoring.
Field crews have checked 65 stands as HCVF — 336 ha of stand area across 19 woodlots. Desk screening has assessed 319 of the 569 active plans, 274 of which carry at least one current value.
30 current High Conservation Values have been identified across the active membership (319 plans) using best-available data confirmed by field cruising. Per-value areas overlap, and some values are mapped without a measured area; assessment of newer plans is being refreshed. Large Intact Forest is listed at the end for continuity — it was identified under the earlier framework and is no longer classified as a High Conservation Value.
| Conservation value | ha | Plans |
|---|---|---|
| Lynx habitat buffer | 5,676 | 104 |
| Municipal water-supply watershed | 1,528 | 38 |
| Species at risk | 326 | 94 |
| Calcareous forest | 209 | 4 |
| Designated water-supply areas | 204 | 5 |
| First Nations reserve lands | 188 | 4 |
| Species of concern | 157 | 28 |
| Sugar-maple floodplain | 151 | 22 |
| Migratory bird habitat | 57 | 6 |
| Canadian Heritage River | 37 | 13 |
| Wilderness area | 33 | 12 |
| Hemlock floodplain | 22 | 1 |
| White spruce dune | 21 | 8 |
| Alkaline fen | 17 | 1 |
| Hemlock forest | 15 | 4 |
| Conservation value | ha | Plans |
|---|---|---|
| Other significant habitat | 11 | 5 |
| National Historic Sites & Parks | 5 | 1 |
| Beech forest | 4 | 1 |
| Provincial Parks & Reserves | 3 | 5 |
| Nature Conservancy lands | 3 | 1 |
| Alkaline bog | 3 | 1 |
| Erosional seabluff | <1 | 2 |
| Vernal pond | <1 | 18 |
| Late-successional (old) forest | — | 15 |
| Eagle nest | — | 1 |
| Coastal treed bog | — | 1 |
| Provincial Wildlife Mgmt Areas | — | 1 |
| Sensitive / of concern | — | 1 |
| Boreal felt lichen | — | 1 |
| Black Ash | — | 2 |
| Large Intact Forest — historic | 6,076 | 98 |
Recommended treatments
Management plans carry 5,824 recommended treatments across the woodlots — the silvicultural and harvest work each plan puts forward over its ten-year horizon. These are recommendations only, not work that is scheduled, under way or complete. Clear cut, pre-commercial thinning, and planting lead by area.
Whether a recommendation becomes real work depends on practical realities: small parcel sizes, access to the stand (wet ground, slopes, a lack of roads), contractor capacity, and whether the return justifies the operation. Work that does go ahead is recorded as a job, and jobs are summarised under Monitoring & oversight below. Figures cover certifiable stands only. Counts exclude a further 10,634 ha deliberately left untreated and 7,100 ha flagged to reassess, and areas overlap where a stand carries treatments in more than one year.
Wood supply & harvest
Across 35,547 hectares of certified forest — standing-inventory estimates held in WMS.
908,538 m³ recommended for removal of 2,380,238 m³ standing — about 38% over ten years, or ~3.8% a year. Every figure here covers certifiable stands; carbon is each woodlot’s inventory estimate apportioned by its certified share of standing volume. Both bars share one scale, so the hardwood bar is shorter simply because less hardwood is standing. Volumes in m³ as held in WMS.
Management objectives
Objectives are set with each owner and written into their plan — on average 4.6 per plan. Sustainable long-term stewardship and timber quality lead, with wildlife, water, and biodiversity close behind.
Monitoring & oversight
Members notify their group manager of planned harvesting and silviculture so field staff can schedule on-site inspections. Operations are monitored for best-practice compliance, environmental safeguards, and worker health & safety, and the results feed back into management.
Audit year 1 September 2025 to 16 September 2026, on woodlots that held FSC certification at any point during that year. Figures are drawn from job and service-request records in WMS.
Operations
Twenty-four harvest jobs and three silviculture jobs. Nine are complete, five are underway, and thirteen are planned.
| Job type | Complete | Underway | Planned | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Harvest | 9 | 4 | 11 | 24 |
| Silviculture | 0 | 1 | 2 | 3 |
| All jobs | 9 | 5 | 13 | 27 |
Jobs are placed in the audit year by their start date, or by their planned start where work has not begun.
Inspections & reviews
About these counts. They come from WMS service requests — the record that a visit was requested, assigned and completed. What inspectors found on site is summarized below from the field inspection forms. Three non-conformance follow-up visits were logged during the audit year, two of them complete.
Inspection findings
On every visit the inspector rates each standard on a field form: acceptable, an observation (a minor issue noted for follow-up), a non-conformance (a breach that needs corrective action), or not applicable. Harvest and treatment standards are checked on operations; safety reviews check the contractor, fuel storage, chainsaw crews, machine operators and machinery.
Bars share one scale of 14 inspections. Observations most often concerned damage to residual trees and machine traffic near riparian buffers.
Small numbers are checks made in each section. Observations most often concerned incident reporting and first-aid training on site, and hard hats and high-visibility clothing for machine operators.
Two non-conformances were raised: a wildlife clump was not left in the largest section of one harvest, and a chainsaw worker was without a pressure bandage. Both were followed up and closed — at the follow-up visit the crew had a pressure bandage on hand. No silviculture inspection forms were completed on member woodlots this audit year; one silviculture inspection is assigned.
From field inspection forms for the audit year, counting visits to woodlots that held FSC certification at any point in the year; test entries are excluded. Figures are being finalized as forms are reviewed — updated 11 September 2026.
Plan implementation
Plans from the 2021 planning year have reached the midpoint of their ten-year term. Each was checked against the plan on file and program job records, and owners were called to ask what has been done, what help they need, and what questions they have.
31 of 37 plans still have recommended work ahead of them at the midpoint — expected in a ten-year plan, and the prompt for each conversation.
Owners reported thinning, planting, harvesting, road building and Hurricane Fiona salvage — for eight of them, work that does not appear in program job records, so these check-ins capture activity owners arrange on their own. Questions ranged from herbicide use and whether to manage actively or let the forest grow, to a nearby wind-farm proposal, a property review, and a digital copy of the plan.
Internal audit · FSC-STD-30-005
Each year the group draws a random sample of member woodlots and reviews each file — the plan, its recommended work, and how conservation values are managed — before interviewing the owner. Calls ran through early September and are continuing; what owners have told us is summarized here.
| Check | Result |
|---|---|
| Management plan on file | 15 of 16 |
| Conservation values on the property | 8 |
| prescription confirmed effective | 6 of 8 |
| No conservation values identified | 6 |
| Question | Owners’ responses |
|---|---|
| Aware of FSC program requirements | Yes, in every case |
| Activity on the woodlot since the plan | One owner |
| Activities not recommended in the plan | None reported |
| Activities meet program requirements | Yes, in every case |
| Satisfaction with the program | Good |
The owner reporting work had improved a woodlot road; another mentioned a cut made six years ago. Satisfaction was good throughout, with one owner noting that delays in getting work done are an issue.
Three owners had no suggestions — one adding how much members value their group manager.
Internal audit · policies and procedures
Alongside the woodlot sample, the group checks its own policies and procedures against the criteria of the FSC standard for small, low-intensity and community forests (2024). A different set is examined each year, so that every criterion is covered within the certificate period. This year’s review covered legal compliance and the right to operate, workers’ rights and health and safety, Indigenous Peoples’ rights, community relations and grievances, monitoring of environmental and social impacts, and consultation on high conservation values. No non-conformances were recorded against the criteria reviewed.
Each finding is recorded against the group’s Policies, Procedures and Governance manual, its Health and Safety Program and its High Conservation Value Framework — the documents that set out how the program meets each requirement.
Five-year check-ins and internal-audit interviews are recorded in program review workbooks and cover plans that held FSC certification during the audit year. Five-year figures were updated 11 September 2026; internal-audit interviews 16 September 2026.
The program on the map
Every one of the 569 member woodlots sits in a Nova Scotia county — save two in Prince Edward Island. The shading counts member woodlots per county, and the pattern is unmistakable: the program is anchored on Cape Breton Island and the province’s eastern mainland.
Inverness alone holds 171 woodlots — nearly a third of the program. Yarmouth is the one Nova Scotia county with no member woodlot yet.
County outlines: Nova Scotia Counties, COGS / NSCC. Member woodlot locations drawn from provincial parcel (PID) matches; two member woodlots (~137 ha) lie in Prince Edward Island and are not shown.