This article is part of the Herald’s 2015 Forestry Supplement, put out each year to coincide with National Forest Week.
In forestry terms, Aleesha Rielley is just a sapling, but her responsibilities with Aspen Planers are an integral part of how that company does business.
Rielley, 22, has lived in Merritt her whole life and obtained a diploma in environmental and natural resource technology at the Nicola Valley Institute of Technology, graduating from the two-year program last May.
“I was really fortunate that I was able to get a job really quick and get on with Aspen [Planers],” she said.
Before being employed by Aspen, she began working with a forestry consultant in cruising — which involves determining the volume of wood in a forester’s cut block, the tree species and the health of the forest.
In July 2014, Rielley started working with Aspen Planers as a planning technician and compass man alongside one of the company’s cruisers.
Her job involves gathering information to determine how much Aspen Planers stands to earn from logging a cut block, how they will go about logging the trees, as well as information about the area’s environment.
“My job, solely, is around collecting the data in order for them to make those decisions,” Rielley said.
Before cruisers venture out, layout crews are sent in to find a cut block and give a general overview of the area, including looking for riparian areas and any endangered species that might be living there.
“They have to go in there and they have to look at things like slope, grading for roads,” Rielley said, noting that cruising is the more detailed version of this planning process.
“Every hectare we have a plot, and in our plot we use what’s called a prism, and that will tell us how many trees are actually within our plot,” Rielley said.
They check the height of the trees and look for any pathogens they may have, such as conks.
Cruising is a government mandate, Rielley said.
“The government needs to know what’s going on in there, so before the loggers can log it, we need to know how much money we’re going to make from this block, and ideally if it’s worth going in and logging and that’s what the cruise helps do,” Rielley said.
Rielley will sometimes be given the responsibility to walk a cut-block’s boundary, streams and roads with a GPS unit, the data from which is digitized to build maps.
Some of the forests Rielley works in include the Lower Nicola area near Logan Lake, the Jura area near Princeton, as well as the Elkhart and Murray Lake areas.
“We have a pretty wide area that we pull from,” Rielley said.
Her feet barely wet from her year working in the industry, Rielley also volunteers as a member of the local forestry committee.
This non-profit group consists of members from various forestry organizations, and they aim to educate the community on the industry and give back.
Some of the ways they do that is host a tree planting for elementary school students on the science of planting trees, doll out bursaries and conduct fundraisers.
