Canadian Forestry Journal, November, ipij. 



265 



TIMBER IN CANADA. 



By 



R. H. Campbell, 

 Director of Forestry. 



Canada's present supply of com- 

 mercial timber has been variously 

 estimated at lying between five and 

 seven hundred billion feet, board 

 measure, and covering an area of ap- 

 proximately 170,000,000 acres. This 

 estimate refers only to timber of 

 commercial value as saw timber. It 

 does not include pulpwood, firewood, 

 tie and pole material or small tim- 

 ber of any description, although this 

 may have considerable commercial 

 value. 



Even pulpwood values are diffi- 

 cult to estimate as so much depends 

 on accessibility to market. Fire- 

 wood may be worth four dollars a 

 cord in the settled parts of the 

 country, and may have absolutely no 

 value whatever in more remote dis- 

 tricts. Ties may be worth forty 

 cents at the railway, but the cost of 

 transporting them may exceed this 

 value, and they then become value- 

 less for the present at least. 



A complete estimate of available 

 forest products could not even be at- 

 tempted with the information exist- 

 ing, and this estimate is therefore 

 largely confined to commercial saw 

 timber (including all material ten 

 inches and over in diameter at the 

 stump). 



British Columbia contains a land 

 area of approximately 226.186,240 

 acres (353,416 square miles), of 

 which about twenty-one per cent, is 

 covered with commercial saw tim- 

 ber. This area of about 50 million 

 acres has been estimated to contain 

 300 billion feet board measure. 



From a paper presented at a meeting of the 

 International Engineering Congress, 1915, in San 

 Francisco, Ca., September 20-25, 1915. 



Coast Types of Timber. 



The coast type is made up largely 

 of Douglas fir, hemlock, Sitka 

 spruce, western red cedar, western 

 tamarack, western white pine and 

 others of less commercial impor- 

 tance, and contains the bulk of Bri- 

 tish Columbia's best saw timber 

 (about 225 million feet). The in- 

 terior is divided into two distinct 

 types. The Dry Belt country is 

 characterized by light precipitation 

 and the tree growth is light in con- 

 sequence. It consists largely of 

 Douglas fir and western yellow pine. 

 The Kootenay country has a high 

 annual precipitation and is practical- 

 ly a modified repetition of the coast 

 type, characterized by the addition 

 of such species as mountain fir and 

 Engelmann spruce, and a lack of 

 Sitka spruce. This type grades into 

 the Southern Rocky Mountain type 

 of mountain fir, Englemann spruce 

 and lodgepole pine, which crosses 

 the summit and clothes the eastern 

 slope of the Rockies down to the 

 prairie line. 



British Columbia cut in 1913: 

 1.173,647,000 feet, board measure, of 

 lumber in her mills. Over two- 

 thirds of this was Douglas fir, about 

 7% was tamarack and 7% red cedar, 

 and of the remainder, 5% was 

 spruce, 5% western yellow pine, 3% 

 hemlock, 2% western white pine, 

 and 1% each, mountain fir and jack 

 pine. With the exception of unim- 

 portant qualities of Cottonwood, 

 maple and birch, no hardwoods are 

 found in this province. Twelve 

 kinds of wood were reported. 



The province of Alberta has a to- 

 tal_ land area of 161,000,000 acres 

 (252,925 square miles), of which 

 5,416,000 acres are said to contain 



