John Prince Research Forest

[Music] Introduction John Prince Research Forest is a land-based research institute that's co-managed between Tl'azt'en Nation and UNBC and it's really focused on natural resource management and natural resource research so we're trying to understand the land base so we can manage it better and more effectively. So it's a pretty big landscape as far as research forests goes, it's about 165 square kilometers so it's a pretty nice chunk of land. Its small enough that we can sort of get our heads around it but big enough that it's representative of the landscape. Research We've done a lot of research sort of on the social side trying to understand what communities want from the research forest and one of the things they've told us they want is to understand the interaction between sort of wildlife species and forestry. That is a big focus of our research so we do a lot of long-term wildlife monitoring and research trying to understand the interactions between populations and population densities of various animals and how we impact that from our forest operations. Education Our education programs are there's a few different pieces to it, one the original part was it's sort of an outdoor laboratory a place for UNBC students to come and learn and do research and we we teach sort of the forestry field school each year deliver a good chunk of it here. But we also have opportunities for undergraduate and graduate students to do research. We've also built up a bigger piece of of sort of local education for for uh sort of primary secondary school through Chuntoh Education Society where we're trying to get uh younger children and then as people go into high school to understand the importance of science and natural resource management. We're generally pretty small it's a small not-for-profit but we have a lot of pieces that come and go so our our business is sort of we have four full-time staff people but we always have a bunch of student employees and interns that sort of cycle through and get lots of different experiences and the hard part is we'd like to keep most of those people we can just never afford to keep a big staff but it's also really great to have a bunch of different students and interns come through so we we can they can get great experience and we can learn from them. The oversight of the research forest is is by Tl'azt'en Nation and UNBC so the board of directors consists of an even number of both. Tl'azten's been very, very engaged and just an incredibly supportive partner. [Music]