Management Plans

What is a Management Plan?

In forestry, forested landscapes are managed for a variety of purposes. When evaluating the land, foresters look for the potential goods and services that it can provide now and in the future.
Logs, food plants, and medicines are examples of goods extracted from forests, while clean water, wildlife habitat, carbon sequestration, recreation and livestock forage are examples of services that forests can provide.

Foresters design management plans that enable sustainable provision of the goods and services that forest owners desire. These landscape or forest-level plans provide the context for site-level plans or prescriptions. Managers can then apply silviculture techniques in the vegetation communities (stands or sites) that make up the forest to produce the desired goods, services and features at specific locations and times across the forest. Here is an example of a forest-level management plan and a site-level plan (prescription) for the UBC Farm.

The prescription was created by UBC Forestry students in their Silviculture course FRST 305

Examples of Management Plans