Vermont: Long term forest resiliency is threatened by chainsaws that mimc ‘natural’ forests
Loggers can accelerate the restoration of mature diverse forests while
making money selling logs right? Wrong! These “restoration” forester’s
failing bias is that they are trying to speed up a process of tree /
structural diversity growth in the short term without recognizing the
amount of resiliency they are removing from the forest stand in the
long term.
Healthy stands of mature diverse forests most often originate from
dense healthy stands of regrowth, which are shaped by centuries of
windstorms, fires, floods, droughts, diseases, animal overuse and
harms to soil vitality. If mature forest stands are meant to live in
the way they once naturally lived they logically need to be
overstocked in the early centuries so there will still be many, many
trees (stand survival options) when the forest grows into its later
centuries.
When foresters claim they are accelerating this process, what they are really saying is that are acting in the same way that windstorms, fires, floods, droughts, diseases, animal overuse and harms to soil vitality act.
In other words foresters are increasing the frequency of the occurrence of ‘natural’ harms that forest stand must endure. The cumulative impacts of increased frequency of harms means the forest stand is more stressed and more vulnerable to total stand failure due to too many windstorms, fires, floods, droughts, diseases animal overuse and harms to soil vitality.
So If you want to ensure a forest stand grows to mature diverse health for a maximum number of years you have to ensure many trees / (stand survival options) survive for as long as possible.
–Editor, Forest Policy Research
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Here’s the article that inspired the message above:
Keeton and others had logged and carefully shaped the wooded slope,
using chainsaws and other machinery to emulate what happens in
woodlands over centuries. Using Mother Nature as a blueprint, Keeton,
a University of Vermont forestry specialist, has developed a technique
that allows for logging while maximizing the carbon kept in the forest
and out of the atmosphere, where it can trap the sun’s heat and drive
global warming.
Get full text; support writer, producer of the words:
http://www.boston.com/business/articles/2009/03/02/nature_gets_makeover_in_forest_lab/?page=full
The primary benefit of such efforts will be to give landowners new options to create forests that are great habitat for wildlife and plants, said Paul Catanzaro, a forest resources specialist for the University of Massachusetts Extension who is involved in that study. But another purpose, he said, “is carbon sequestration – the idea of older forests and bigger trees locking up carbon.”
Keeton is quick to point out that other factors outside the forest itself have to be considered when weighing the pros and cons of various forest management strategies. The new focus on finding ways to make existing forests better at holding carbon could bring new economic value to the land.
“People often have a sense they want to do right by the land,” said Michael Snyder, the Chittenden County forester in Vermont. “For the forest to be healthy, and for it to be good for wildlife,” he said, and – if possible – to make some money on it.
Get full text; support writer, producer of the words:
http://www.boston.com/business/articles/2009/03/02/nature_gets_makeover_in_forest_lab/?page=full
Excellent post.
It is indeed a sham– let a ‘forester’ loose in a forest, and they mark every tree that could yield a 2×4.
What ‘forestry’ does around here is ‘hi-grade’, taking the best stock out of the gene-pool. Sort of like hunters who ‘cull’ the herd by murdering the biggest alpha-male with the largest rack they can find. You’d never be able to trust them even if there was a science to their collusion with loggers.
The forests of Massachusetts, where you get a tax break for ‘management’, are mostly gnarled, small, sad trees tho I did find a grove of magnificent old-growth Beech, in a gulley, too big for axe-men to haul up the ledge in olden days, and I ain’t tellin’ anyone where it is!
Once the logger gets done, of course anything left standing is scarred, broken, roots compacted, and exposed to wind and disease, and slash-fires. Of course then a huge crop of seedlings results and it will take a century or two to weed out.
In the eastern forests, pioneer species are white pine, which i not a late successional forest for most of the region. But where it did exist, it must have been amazing, our tallest conifer…
Too bad, the people of the Eastern US will never know what they lost. Mary Bird Davis has been cataloguing our few patches of remaining trees… almost nothing at all left of VT.
If people study these forests, they understand it’s not like growing vegetables, it takes many centuries to regrow a forest. Not something for us to control.
Getting rid of anything ‘mature’ is going to be detrimental to the world. Mature trees (or people for that matter) can not simply be removed and replaced.