The Trans Canada Trail Foundation would like to make a presentation about the Canadian experience of creating the world’s longest multi-use recreational trail. When completed, the national Trail will extend 21,000 kilometres from the Atlantic to the Pacific to the Arctic Oceans, linking every province and territory, 1000 communities and 33 million Canadians. The Trail joins existing recreational trails, provincial and national parks, crown land, and private land. Trail users can experience Canada’s legendary wilderness, visit our provincial capitals, explore historical towns, get active and be outdoors. The Trail’s cross-Canada route includes backwoods paths, converted rail corridors, paved urban walkways, logging roads, mountain passes, ferry rides, canoe routes, national and provincial parks and far north highways. It offers some of the best cycling, hiking, cross-country skiing, canoeing, horseback riding and snowmobiling experiences in the world. The Trans Canada Trail is a community-based project. Different sections of the Trail are owned, managed and maintained by local trail groups or by municipal, provincial or federal governments. Each section represents the hard work and dedication of thousands of volunteers at the community level. This approach is fundamental to the vision of the Trans Canada Trail because it nurtures a profound sense of local ownership, control and pride. The Trans Canada Trail is supported by individuals, governments, foundations and businesses. There are many benefits of the Trail: conservation: The Trail preserves green space, promotes conservation and protects the environment. health: It inspires Canadians of all ages to get active and keep fit. economic benefits: It contributes to local economic growth. According to a PricewaterhouseCoopers study, it will generate $2.4 billion annually in Ontario alone. Today more than 65% of the Trail across the country is complete; 95% in Quebec. It is already a recognized recreation, vacation and tourist destination. Presentation outline: How the project began Building a national organization Role of provincial/territorial organizations and relationship with local trail groups Building support – individuals, government, business Nature and extent of Trail development Current and future challenges Trans Canada Trail: more than a dream… a reality.

Access to document: E15_English_Senecal.pdf

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Addressing the recreation experience in sustainable forest management
Howard Harshaw, University of British Columbia (Vancouver, Canada)

The relative ubiquity of outdoor recreation participation in North American forested landscapes requires that forest managers explicitly address outdoor recreation. For example, over half of the user-days reported by Canadians for all outdoor nature-based activities in 1996 occurred in forested landscapes outside of parks and protected areas. This presentation describes an approach for improving existing methods of addressing outdoor recreation within the context of sustainable forest management by incorporating the recreation opportunity spectrum into timber harvest models. Sustainable Forest Management (SFM) certification frameworks have influenced forestry planning and management worldwide. SFM practices require that forest managers address three components of sustainably managed forests: economic, ecological, and social values. An important element of social sustainability are the benefits that people derive from forested landscapes, such as quality of life, aesthetics, and opportunities for outdoor recreation. The indicators established in many SFM frameworks do not meaningfully address recreation experience, though this is central to meeting recreationists’ needs. The formalization of the recreation opportunity spectrum (ROS) into SFM certification frameworks may help to address this important but difficult-to-quantify social endeavour, by indicating the experiences that may be available across the landscape. The ROS assumes that outdoor recreation quality can be secured through the identification and provision of a diverse set of recreation opportunities across a landscape. By identifying and providing a range of settings, managers can offer recreation opportunities that appeal to broad segments of the public. A diversity of recreation settings provides forest managers with temporal and spatial flexi-bility for the provision of recreation opportunities, and permits responses to changes in demand for recreation activities, settings, and experiences. Although the ROS is an excellent descriptive tool, its prescriptive function may assist forest managers address recreation experience outcomes: the naturalness dimension (i.e. motorized use and evidence of humans) and social experience dimension (i.e. solitude/self-reliance and social encounters) identify management conditions that directly impact recreation experience. The indicator of outdoor recreation proposed here, the area and percent of forest land managed for a diversity of recreation opportunity class settings, extends current approaches for cataloguing recreation infrastructure elements by explicitly incorporating recreation experience.

Access to document: E15_Howard_Harshaw.pdf