This page is a subpage of Lichen Camp
(www.nsforestmatters.ca/The Camps/Lichen Camp/Goldsmith Lake Wilderness Area proposal)
The proposal and related correspondence, articles
– The proposal to protect the Goldsmith Lake Wilderness Area
“The original proposal to protect the Goldsmith Lake Wilderness Area was submitted to the Protected Areas Branch (Department of Environment and Climate Change) in November 2022. Since that time there have been many more amazing discoveries of Species at Risk and Old Growth so the Citizen Scientists of Southwest Nova Scotia submitted an update to the proposal. This update was submitted to the Protected Areas Branch, and Minister Halman on May 22, 2024.” – Laura Bright on Friends of Goldsmith lake Wilderness Area May 27, 2024
View: Updated Goldsmith Lake Wilderness Area Proposal 2024-05-22
– Letter-writing campaign
Suggested Base Letter, February 25, 2025
| Dear Minister Rushton, It’s a year now since the Citizen Scientits of Southwest Nova Scotia learned that your department had placed a hold on all the harvest plans near Goldsmith Lake where they had identified species at risk. Thank you for going beyond the application of mandatory buffers on individual lichens, and instead working to protect the habitat in which these species at risk lichens occur. This is a crucial step as we all work to protect biodiversity in our province. Maintaining the hold on these harvest plans is an important acknowledgement of the ongoing work citizen scientists have been doing to supplement DNRR’s data. In the last year they have documented unsuspected old growth forests and yet more species at risk lichens in the area around Goldsmith Lake. To date they have reported 34 SAR occurrences to DNRR. They have also conducted an innova ve and scientifically valid calicioid lichen survey demonstrating the high level of ecological con nuity present in forest previously approved for harves ng. A scien fic paper about this survey has been reviewed and recommended for publication by Troy McMullin, research scientist in lichenology at the Canadian Museum of Nature. The hold you have maintained on harvestng in all the areas touched by species at risk occurrences is an essential interim step to permanently preserving the high conservation value of the area. I hope now you will take the next step and support the Ci zen Scientists’ proposal to formally protect the area as the Goldsmith Lake Wilderness Area. The proposal was submitteded to Minister Halman in November 2022. Will you support this proposal and, in the meantime, maintain the holds placed on harvest plans that were approved before the full ecological value of this area was understood?
Name, Community |
– Response On behalf on Minister Rushton, Aug 16, 2024.
Subject: RE: Please maintain the hold on harvests around Goldsmith
To L.B.
| Dear L.B.:On behalf on Minister Rushton, I am responding to your letter of February 25, 2024, regarding Crown lands west of Goldsmith Lake.Biodiversity conservation and a sustainable forestry industry are key priorities. We are making progress on establishing the three zones on Crown lands, as recommended in the Forest Practices Review.
The forest management in the Goldsmith Lake area, under the Silvicultural Guide for the Ecological Matrix (SGEM), has the goal of increasing the structural complexity, species diversity, and enhanced resilience to climate change within that forest ecosystem. We continue to take action when reports of species at risk (SAR) are identified. Portions of three harvest blocks in the Goldsmith Lake area have been put on hold while recent reports of SAR lichens in the area are being investigated further. The remaining harvest blocks, where SAR have not been reported, are available to the license holder for scheduling forestry operations. In 2021, our government committed to protecting 20 percent of Nova Scotia’s land and water by 2030. This was later enacted in legislation through the Environmental Goals and Climate Change Reduction Act. Government recently released the Collaborative Protected Areas Strategy for Nova Scotia, which sets the direction to achieve this conservation goal. Staff within both the Departments of Natural Resources and Renewables and the Department of Environment and Climate Change are working together to develop a process for implementing the priority actions identified in the Strategy, which includes a process for the identification of lands for protection. As work is underway on the implementing the Strategy, government will continue to manage Crown lands under the ecological forestry management regime and provide updates to the public on the implementation of the Protected Areas Strategy. Your interest in Crown lands at Goldsmith Lake has been documented and will be taken into consideration. Regards, Original signed by Matt Parker |
– Protecting Goldsmith Lake,
Published in the Bridgetown Reader August 9, 2024
There’s a lot going on around Goldsmith Lake these days, from an Op-Ed in the Chronicle Herald calling for permanent protection for the area, to WestFor’s plans to log there. This pristine lake on the South Mountain inland from Tupperville hasn’t seen so much excitement in a long time. Known to local fishers as a place where native trout still thrive and to biologists as the headwaters of the East Branch of the Round Hill River, where young salmon have once again been documented, the area is unusual and important in a number of ways. Goldsmith Lake has never been dammed and has no cottage development around it. Satellite images show that the forests surrounding it largely escaped the wave of clearcutting that stripped the South Mountain between 2001 and 2022. Drone shots show how continuous the forest is, barring, that is, the slash of a logging road WestFor put in on the west side of the lake two years ago.
From the point of view of carbon storage, flood buffering, wildlife habitat, continuous forest cover like this is not only unusual, it is crucial. It’s not just quantity that counts on all these fronts, it is quality too. The older and more diverse the forest the better. Clearcuts and the young softwood plantations that often follow just don’t do the job. Over the centuries, and particularly in the last 50 years, Nova Scotia’s forests have gotten younger and simpler. As a result they are less resilient. It is a matter of urgency now to protect the best of what is left.
The forest surrounding Goldsmith Lake saw plenty of cutting during the time the Bowater Mersey pulp mill owned the land from 1970 to 2012. Most of it took place between 1970 and the mid 1990s. Quite a few Annapolis County residents worked in those woods during that time, cutting, planting and thinning. So some of the forest cover is only 30-50 year old. It’s hard to find anywhere on Crown land that doesn’t include such areas of relatively young ‘managed’ forest. The interesting thing about the area around Goldsmith Lake is how much old forest Bowater left. This is partly because, as a pulp mill, they were interested in softwoods — red spruce and fir mainly — and so spared many of the area’s hardwood stands. As it happens, Goldsmith Lake has some unusually good soils for the South Mountain, soils of the sort required by long-lived hardwoods such as the huge sugar maple and yellow birch that can be found there.
Two stands of old growth mixed forest have long been recognized and protected on the west shore of Goldsmith Lake, first by Bowater then by the Department of Natural Resources and Renewables (NRR). What is extraordinary and exciting is the discovery of how much more old and old growth forest there is in the area. Just north of those known parcels, for example, still on the west side of the lake, is a whole hill — a drumlin — of old forest, the crown of which is a 9.2 ha stand. The trees sampled in that stand by NRR last year averaged over 250 years old. The province’s age threshold for old growth hardwood forest is 140 years. It is on that hilltop that citizen scientists found the largest tree so far in the whole area, a Yellow Birch measuring 107 centimeters in diameter at breast height.
These citizen scientists, formally the Citizen Scientists of Southwest Nova Scotia, are a volunteer group of naturalists who have been doing something called ground-truthing, otherwise known as spending time in the woods (as opposed to studying computer models) to find out what’s there. Most, including Karen Achenbach, Nina Newington, Lisa Proulx and Ashlea Viola, are Annapolis County residents.
Between their efforts and the work of NRR’s Old Growth Forest team, it now looks as if old growth forests essentially ring Goldsmith Lake, as well as being found on the peninsula that separates the two arms of the lake, and on islands in the lake. More stands have been discovered recently further to the west and east of Goldsmith. Just as important, from the point of view of conservation, are the large areas of late mature (over 80) and old (over 120) forest that wrap around many of those stands of old growth forest.
If left undisturbed these mature and old forests have everything they need to become old growth. Since estimates suggest that less than 1% of the forests left in the province are currently old-growth, this is a big deal. There is only one way to rebuild the stock of old-growth and that is by leaving old forest alone for however many years are required. You can’t hurry the process but you can mess it up by logging in those forests.
Why does it matter so much to rebuild the amount of old growth? Simply put, old growth forest supports the greatest variety of life. It is far more diverse than young forest, both in its composition – the number of different species living there both above and below ground — and its structure. Old-growth forest is complete and complex. It has had time to develop a huge number of nooks and crannies also known as microhabitats, from the crowns of mature trees to the trunks of fallen giants colonized by moss and fungi, to the seedling trees growing on those decaying nurse logs. There is so much more happening under our feet in an old forest than science has even begun to describe. This variety of life – biodiversity — is under threat from many directions, most of which, like climate change, boil down to the way our economic system has led us to extract, refine and use more and more of nature’s resources in pursuit of perpetual growth. We consume too much and, as a result, we produce too much waste for the earth to absorb. The years between 1970 and 2016 saw a 70% drop in the populations of mammals, birds, fish, reptiles and amphibians (based on 4392 monitored species).
Recognizing the mess that we are in, 196 countries signed onto the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework in December 2022. They – including Canada – committed to permanently protecting 30% of land and waters by 2030. Here in Nova Scotia our government had already made a legal commitment to protect 20% by 2030. Thirteen and a half percent of Nova Scotia is currently protected so in the next six years, we will be adding another 6 1/2% of the province or 350,000 ha. Most of this will come from Crown land. That’s where Goldsmith Lake comes in.
Local fishers aren’t the only ones who know what a special place this area is. Local naturalists and forest ecologists have long been aware of the area. In fact, when NRR posted plans to log 462 ha of it on their Harvest Plan Map Viewer, they got an earful about importance of conserving this area. Members of the public were given 40 days to comment in the spring of 2022, but they weren’t informed of the decision to allow logging to go ahead. They only found that out in October 2022 when some of the citizen scientists came upon a brand new logging road west of Goldsmith Lake. After staring, sickened, at the 30m wide roadway clearcut through old forest to make a 6m wide road, they set about collecting evidence of the ecological importance of the area. This evidence includes identifying old-growth and documenting biodiversity, in particular the presence of species at risk, from birds to lichens.
In less than a month they had identified seven species at risk (SAR) occurrences in the cutblocks just west of the lake. CBC came out to film a segment with members of the group. As the Citizen Scientists of Southwest Nova Scotia, they submitted a proposal to the Department of Environment and Climate Change to protect the Goldsmith Lake Wilderness Area in November 2022. The proposed Wilderness Area covers 3900 ha of Crown land stretching from Barry’s Stillwater in the west to the western shore of Dalhousie Lake in the east.
The group’s efforts to find species at risk didn’t end then. Far from it. As of July 23rd they have identified and reported 68 species at risk occurrences within the proposed Wilderness Area. But that’s a story for another article. Suffice to say that no logging has taken place around Goldsmith Lake so far, though a small amount did take place around Stailings Lake, further to the west.
Important as science is and should be in deciding which areas will be protected, politics is inevitably going to play a part. Thanks to outreach by the Save Our Old Forests (SOOF) association, the Municipality of the County of Annapolis and the Towns of Annapolis Royal and Middleton have written letters supporting the protection of the proposed Goldsmith Lake Wilderness Area. Citizen scientists and members of SOOF are eager to talk with all the groups who use the area, including snowmobiles and ATVers, to ensure that they too can continue to enjoy this special place.