USA: Too often personal agendas define how much old growth forest remains

As crazy as it sounds, no one really knows how much old growth is left
in America’s forested regions, mainly because various agencies and
scientists have different ideas about how to define the term. In 1991,
for example, the U.S. Forest Service and the nonprofit Wilderness
Society each released its own inventory of old-growth forests in the
Pacific Northwest and northern California. They both used the Forest
Service’s definition based on the number, age and density of large
trees per acre, the characteristics of the forest canopy, the number
of dead standing trees and fallen logs and other criteria.

However,
because each agency used different remote sensing techniques to glean
data, the Forest Service came up with 4.3 million acres of old-growth
and the Wilderness Society found only two million acres. The NCSSF
also studied the data, and they concluded that 3.5 million acres (or
six percent) of the region’s 56.8 million acres of forest qualified as
old growth—that is, largely trees over 30 inches in diameter with
complex forest canopies. By broadening the definition to include older
forest with medium-diameter trees and both simple and complex
canopies, NCSSF said their figure would go up substantially. In other
parts of the country, less than one percent of Northeast forest is old
growth, though mature forests that will become old growth in a few
decades are more abundant. The Southeast has even less acreage—a 1993
inventory found about 425 old growth sites across the region, equaling
only a half a percent of total forest area. The Southwest has only a
few scattered pockets of old-growth (mostly Ponderosa Pine), but for
the most part is not known for its age-old trees. Old-growth is even
scarcer in the Great Lakes. It is hard to say whether the remaining
pockets of scattered old-growth in areas besides the Pacific Northwest
will remain protected, but environmentalists are working hard to save
what they can in northern California, Oregon and Washington. The
outgoing Bush administration recently announced plans to increase
logging across Oregon’s remaining old-growth reserves by some 700
percent, in effect overturning the landmark Northwest Forest Plan of
1994 that set aside most of the region’s remaining old growth as
habitat for the endangered spotted owl.
http://www.healthnewsdigest.com/news/Environment_380/How_Much_Old_Growth_Forest_Do_We_Have_Left.shtml

Posted via email from Deane’s posterous