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Canada's Forests As the country with the second-largest area in the world, Canada is home to one-tenth of the world's remaining forests and one-fifth of the world's fresh water. Many Canadian forests are of global ecological significance. The temperate rainforest, which stretches along the British Columbia coast, comprises one-quarter of the world's remaining temperate rainforests. The northern boreal forests cover 35 percent of Canada's land mass - stretching from Newfoundland to the Yukon - and represent the largest contiguous intact forest remaining on earth.
The most widespread logging method practiced in this industrial forestry is clear-cut logging, which strips huge swaths of the forest bare and leaves behind an insufficient number of trees for the forest to regenerate itself. Clearcuts as large as 10,000 hectares - the size of the city of Vancouver - can be found in Canada's boreal forest. Inadequate government regulation of industrial forestry operations in these publicly owned forests means entire ecosystems are severely affected in the short- and long-term. It is because of these threats and the global importance of these forests that our work is currently focused on these two critical ecosystems.
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The variety of forests types in Canada, including their immense diversity of plant and animal life, is truly incredible. From the band of 
A unique feature of Canadian forests is the amount that is publicly owned. Almost 90 percent of Canadian forests are Crown lands, which are managed by the provincial governments. This management, or tenure, system offers opportunities for public involvement. However, governments anxious for job creation, have essentially ceded day-to-day management to multinational corporations that hold long-term lease agreements to log these forests. 
