This is by far the most ambitious Healthy Landscapes project. The objective of LandWeb is to define historical NRV conditions at landscape scales across 140 million ha of the western boreal from spatially explicit simulation modelling. The output will provide NRV for landscape scale metrics such as seral-stage levels and old forest patch sizes.
One of the first research projects undertaken by the Healthy Landscapes Program remains today as one of the more complex. Originally, our partners were interested in fundamental questions such as the sizes of natural disturbances and historic levels and sizes of old forest. These seemingly simple questions required several layers of research to address.
Natural landscape mosaics that we see today (or 50 or 100 years ago) are the result of hundreds of years of wildfires interacting with soil, topography, climate, and tree species dynamics over time and space. Old forest is created over many decades, and thus we can only explain their patterns when we understand the causes. Unfortunately, we do not have detailed knowledge of natural landscapes from decades or centuries ago.