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The Government of Canada has embraced circular economy and is supporting an increasing number of initiatives in the field. However, implementation examples remain scattered and certain stakeholders are eager to see a greater level of commitment from policy makers. The purpose of this study is to provide a Canadian perspective on how, and to what extent, forest products are compatible with circular economy strategies. This topic was investigated through interviews with 16 Canadian experts in eco-design, circular economy, forest products and/or waste management, with a focus on construction and packaging. Efforts made by forest industries at the manufacturing stage to reduce resource consumption were acknowledged, but the implementation of other circular economy strategies, such as reuse, recycling and energy recovery, is uneven. While there is low-hanging fruit for incremental improvements, such as the processing of recovered lumber in wood panels and not mixing cardboard fibres with other paper streams to avoid downcycling, several barriers to the widespread adoption of the most promising strategies were identified. The experts consulted proposed several solutions to accelerate the deployment of circular economy strategies for forest products, for which government interventions would need to be tailored to the different policy readiness levels (PRLs) observed in the construction and packaging sectors. With circularity having economy-wide implications, setting a clear policy direction at the national level, with a circular economy roadmap for Canada for example, could accelerate coordinated implementation within and across sectors, including forest industries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"Snow gone" (SGN) stage is one of the critical variables that describe the start of the official forest fire season in the Canadian Province of Alberta. In this paper, our objective is to evaluate the potential of MODIS-based indices for determining the SGN stage. Those included: (i) enhanced vegetation index (EVI), (ii) normalized difference water index (NDWI) using the shortwave infrared (SWIR) spectral bands centered at 1.64 μm (NDWI1.64μm) and at 2.13 μm (NDWI2.13μm), and (iii) normalized difference snow index (NDSI). These were calculated using the 500 m 8-day gridded MODIS-based composites of surface reflectance data (i.e., MOD09A1 v.005) for the period 2006-08. We performed a qualitative evaluation of these indices over two forest fire prone natural subregions in Alberta (i.e., central mixedwood and lower boreal highlands). In the process, we generated and compared the natural subregion-specific lookout tower sites average: (i) temporal trends for each of the indices, and (ii) SGN stage using the ground-based observations available from Alberta Sustainable Resource Development. The EVI-values were found to have large uncertainty at the onset of the spring and unable to predict the SGN stages precisely. In terms of NDSI, it showed earlier prediction capabilities. On the contrary, both of the NDWI's showed distinct pattern (i.e., reached a minimum value before started to increase again during the spring) in relation to observed SGN stages. Thus further analysis was carried out to determine the best predictor by comparing the NDWI's predicted SGN stages with the ground-based observations at all of the individual lookout tower sites (approximately 120 in total) across the study area. It revealed that NDWI2.13μm demonstrated better prediction capabilities (i.e., on an average approximately 90% of the observations fell within ±2 periods or ±16 days of deviation) in comparison to NDWI1.64μm (i.e., on an average approximately 73% of the observations fell within ±2 periods or ±16 days of deviation). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]