The Growing Confidence in Forestry’s Future (GCFF) research programme has the overall objective of significantly improving the productivity and profitability of radiata pine forests.
The vision: to shift New Zealand’s forest management to ‘precision forestry’ by taking a systems-wide approach and integrating the latest advances in science and technology into forest management.
Precision forestry is:
Planning and conducting site-specific forest management activities and operations to:
- improve wood product quality and utilisation
- reduce waste
- increase profits
- maintain the quality of the environment.
GCFF is a six-year (2014-2019 inclusive) joint initiative between Scion, the forest growing industry and the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment (MBIE). It has an average budget of $5.1 million per annum.
For more information, visit GCFF strategy document.
Key activities
The GCFF programme has four over-arching research aims:
- Maximising benefits from existing forests – a systems approach
- Describing and segregating the existing standing tree resource
- Enhancing productivity of older stands
- Building more productive, higher quality forests for the future
- Phenotyping the forest
- Doubling radiata pine productivity
- Enhancing activity of the soil microbial community
- Sustainability under intensified regimes
- Ensuring sustainability of soil, water and biodiversity and over multiple rotations
- Developing spatial economic models for sustainable forestry
- Closing the gap: translating science into sustainable business growth
- Establishing innovation clusters
- Communicating with end users.
Contacts
FGR GCFF Technical Steering Team:
| Company | Contact |
| City Forests Limited | Peter Oliver |
| Hancock Forest Management (NZ) Limited | Simon Papps |
| Port Blakely Limited NZ | Aaron Gunn |
| Rayonier | Matariki Forests | Paul Adams |
| Timberlands Limited | Ian Hinton |
Science leader: Dr Peter Clinton peter.clinton@scionresearch.com
Growing Confidence in Forestry’s Future website
Collaborators
The GCFF project has close links with:
- the Healthy Trees, Healthy Future research programme
- the Radiata Pine Breeding Company’s genomic selection programme
