Forestry on Crown land

Managed Crown forests

About 44% of Ontario’s Crown forest is designated as managed forest. Ontario is responsible for its long-term health and shares day-to-day planning and implementation with forest companies, communities, and other forest managers.

The system is built around sustainability, public and Indigenous involvement, and adaptive management. It supports timber and jobs while conserving biodiversity, wildlife habitat, water, recreation, and other forest values. Ontario explains the full system here.

Forest management units

Ontario divides the managed Crown forest into geographic planning areas called management units. A Forest Management Plan is prepared for each unit and renewed through the provincial planning cycle.

Most units are managed under a Sustainable Forest Licence (SFL). An SFL can run for up to 20 years and assigns both harvesting rights and substantial responsibilities: preparing plans, gathering forest information, renewing the forest, monitoring compliance, and reporting results. A smaller number of units use Crown, Local Forest Management Corporation, or Algonquin Forestry Authority tenure. See Ontario’s current SFL information.

Explore forestry activity across Ontario

Start with Ontario’s 39 current management units, then choose a forest to see its 2026 work schedule. CrownAccess Plus adds reported harvest and tending history by year, plus the most recent 2024 Annual Report roads.

Current management-unit list: Ontario, 2026–2027. Current work schedules and 2024 Annual Reports: Ontario MNR NRIP Forestry Viewer.

Forest management units are not the same thing as the Wildlife Management Units that set hunting seasons. The two boundaries are drawn for different purposes and do not line up. If you are planning a hunt around recent cuts or bush roads, both layers are worth having on at once.

Harvest by year

Every forest manager files an Annual Report describing what was actually done, and Ontario publishes the harvest polygons from those reports. CrownAccess carries all of them: 388,093 harvest blocks across 23 reported years, from 2002 through 2024. Pick a year and the map opens on it.

The year shown is the start year of the Annual Report period, so a block filed under 2019 was cut some time between April 2019 and March 2020. Reported harvest is history, not a description of the ground today: a 2004 cut is a twenty-year-old stand now, and the road that served it may be grown in, gated, or gone.

Source: Ontario Forest Historical Annual Report Data and the MNR NRIP Forestry Viewer, combined across all published forests. 2026 is the approved Annual Work Schedule: planned work that may start late, change, or not proceed at all.

Roads by year

Annual Reports also record road construction, maintenance and decommissioning, and most of the bush roads people drive to a lake or a cut block exist because a forest manager built them to reach timber. CrownAccess carries the reported road activity from the most recent published year.

A mapped road is not proof that it is public, open, maintained or passable. It says a road was reported there in that reporting year. For what the responsibility labels mean and where the public right of passage comes from, read the Roads on Crown land guide.

Herbicide and tending

After a block is harvested and replanted, the manager has to keep competing brush off the young conifers. Cut a boreal stand and what comes back first is not spruce: it is raspberry, aspen and pin cherry, and they grow faster than anything planted. Ontario's law requires a harvested Crown forest to be renewed to the forest type the plan calls for, so the seedlings go in and then have to be kept from being shaded out. Herbicide is the cheapest way to do that at scale — mechanical brush cutting costs several times more per hectare, and accepting a hardwood stand instead may not be something the approved plan allows.

Glyphosate is the main product, and Ontario records two treatment codes. CLCHEMA is aerial application, sprayed from a helicopter over a whole block, and it is the one with a drift buffer around water. CLCHEMG is ground application, crews on foot spot-treating around individual seedlings, with a far smaller footprint. Spraying happens in late summer, typically August into early September; a treated block goes brown within a few weeks and stays that way through the following spring.

A sprayed block is not closed to the public. What changes is what you find there. Raspberry and blueberry are exactly the brush the treatment targets, so a recent cut is a poor place to pick, and the province advises against harvesting wild food from treated areas in the season of application. Browse disappears for a few years, so moose and deer move off treated blocks onto untreated ones nearby — worth knowing in both directions when you plan a hunt. The forest manager posts notice of aerial operations before they happen, at access points and in local media; those notices carry the actual dates, and the published schedule below does not.

Every treatment is scheduled a year ahead and reported afterwards, so you can look up whether a block you use is on the list. 2026 is what is scheduled in the current Annual Work Schedule year, April 1 2026 to March 31 2027. Every earlier year is what was reported as actually done, from each forest's Annual Report.

Forest Management Plans

Before forestry operations can take place, an approved Forest Management Plan must be in place. A registered professional forester leads an interdisciplinary planning team, with input from Indigenous communities, local citizens, stakeholders, and the public. Plans normally cover a 10-year period and must demonstrate forest sustainability.

Each plan brings the forest inventory, known natural-resource and cultural values, and long-term management direction together. It identifies objectives and indicators, where and how much harvesting may occur, primary and branch road corridors, forest renewal and tending, protection measures, monitoring, and how results will be reported and used in the next planning cycle.

The plan is put into action through a detailed Annual Work Schedule for each year. Annual Reports then record completed harvest, renewal, tending, natural disturbance, roads, and monitoring results. Read Ontario’s forest management planning guide or open the official 2024 Planning Manual.