image

Dear Members of the Legislative Council,

I have now obtained a new map on the impact of the Tasmanian Forest Agreement, and I am keen for you to have a look at it.

I requested this map to be prepared, and it shows the specific impact on the previous Special Timbers Zone, (STZ), as well as on the area of State Forest.

More work is necessary on this issue using the shape files that I believe exist, but I have been unable to obtain them, and I would be interested for those to be available to the now retired forester Mike Peterson, who could apply them to the knowledge he has of where the best Special Timbers actually are, and where they are not.
Information needs to be available at large scale, and with GIS data in order to make useful progress. We know some of the areas offered up in the last days of the signatories negotiations and included in the Specialty Craft and Timber Zone were not that rich in Special Timbers, and some had actually been harvested in quite recent times.

This new map is presented on the right hand side of the attached document in landscape mode, alongside the map I have previously circulated, which shows the existing STZ as it appeared in the Special Timbers Strategy of 2010. I have presented these together so that you can compare them.

This causes the attachment to be a large file, and if you prefer, I can send the two maps separately. If you can receive the file, zoom up to 200% and position it so that you can see both maps and make comparisons. There is a single page of text following the maps.

Download below, Version 1 with maps attached as a pdf file, Version 2 will follow with the maps as a Word file, size 6.8 MB

On this occasion I also add the image from the Tas Fire Service which shows the small fire near the Observer Tree that allegedly brought the tree-sitter to the ground. I include this to show that it is hardly HCV forest, and certainly not forest of the standard that justifies WHA inclusion. Note the many forestry roads, plantations, re-generation sites, recent and long ago harvest sites, highways and major roads, and the regularly slashed power transmission lines!

Thank you for your interest, and your preparedness to examine this issue,

Regards,

George Harris

Download:
Special_Timbers_map_comnparison.pdf