What makes a forest healthy? And can logging improve forest health?
Perhaps you’ve seen ads – from paper companies, loggers, and sometimes foresters – with this message: “If you want your forest to be healthy, call us today!” It’s a very tempting invitation, for above all else, we all want healthy forests. But can logging really improve the health of a forest?
The answer is an emphatic maybe. There are many good reasons to cut trees in your woods, but improving forest health is, at best, questionable.
So-Called Selective cutting can increase dfferent age classes
and begin to bring back horizontal and vertical tangle(below),
a better haven for wildlife to find food and shelter
So-Called Selective cutting can increase dfferent age classes
and begin to bring back horizontal and vertical tangle(below),
a better haven for wildlife to find food and shelter
First, there’s the question of what is a healthy forest. It’s not a green dreamland where nothing dies. On the contrary, it is a place where everything dies. Trees, especially, are killers. New young ones fight each other to the death, shading out their neighbors as they reach for the sun. By the time a tree has reached the canopy, it has killed dozens of its compatriots.
A multitude of organisms has evolved to capture the enormous amount of energy that is stored in dead trees of all sizes. Some of these have figured out how to feed not just on dead, but on dying trees. And, yes, some insects, bacteria, and fungi jump the gun a little and kill stressed trees.
But notice that these agents of death are themselves forms of life. They actively recycle leaves, bark, and wood, keeping a grip on most of the nutrients until another living plant can incorporate them once again. The rate at which trees grow is closely coupled to the rate at which animals and microbes consume dead plants, releasing essential nutrients for tree uptake. In a healthy forest, predators, weather, and the trees’ chemical defenses combine to keep insects and diseases below the levels that seriously harm the plant community. Individual trees die, the plant community lives.
If death doesn’t signify ill health, what does? And can a logging job fix it? Seriously ill forests are missing whole generations of trees or important tree species. Pollution is thought to be the main cause of the terribly sick forests in Europe. And we all know about the losses in this country from introduced diseases and insects – I won’t repeat the long, all too familiar, sorrowful list. Whether it’s the ‘cogs in the wheel’ or ‘rivets in the airplane’ analogy of ecological health, losing key pieces is not good for the community. Logging, however, can’t cure these problems and didn’t cause them.
What logging can do is to greatly improve a forest’s productivity. Even if you yourself have never marked the tress to be removed in a logging operation, you can imagine what it’s like: freeing some of the best trees to grow, removing some of those that are poorly formed, suppressed, or diseased. Working carefully over a long period of time, landowners and foresters can dramatically change a forest’s ultimate value and usefulness to humans, while preserving almost all of its beauty and ecological integrity.
There is no way logging could improve the health of a pristine, untouched forest, especially one magically isolated from today’s polluted air. But most of the forest now growing in the Northeast is far from untouched. Instead, our woods usually consist of trees of the same age – even-aged stands – that became established on abandoned fields and pastures. This situation is unnatural enough that a thoughtful logging operation has a good chance of making it better. Harvests that result in sunny openings, for instance, provide enough sunlight for seedlings and saplings to become established, and a new generation of trees is able to get a start. This adds complexity and creates what foresters and ecologists call structural diversity, a plus for many wildlife species.
I’d love to think that logging can cure a forest’s ills, but it seems to me that logging, for the most part, it’s is exactly like everything else we humans do – whether it’s driving a car, eating a meal, or reading a newspaper – our every move takes some small something from the earth and diverts it to our species. None of us is a hero in Mother Nature’s eyes. The best we can do is to minimize our impact. Cutting trees for our needs close to home, using methods that are in harmony with nature and which sustain the health and and which sustain the health and diversity of the forest, easily beats most of the alternatives.
Virginia Barlow is the former editor of Northern Woodlands magazine in Corinth, VT.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Landscape History of Central New England
Seven of the Harvard Forest dioramas form a historical series that depicts changes in the New England landscape over the past 300 years at one location. The scene was designed to depict all the important transformations of the landscape in the upland area of central Massachusetts since the pre-European-settlement period.
The ecological and historical interpretation of the details and significance of these transformations has changed little since Fisher and his colleagues designed the dioramas in the 1920s and 1930s. Importantly, the concepts presented in the dioramas provide the basis for much current understanding and research ecology, conservation biology, and forest management at the Harvard Forest and beyond.
One of the major lessons that emerges from the dioramas is that in order to understand our forests today we need to become deeply knowledgeable about their particular history. This historical perspective shows us that our forests have always been characterized by change and carry a strong cultural legacy of past human activity. This understanding should inform our predictions of future forest development, as well as our attempts to conserve and manage them.
1700 A.D.
In the pre-settlement forest,
natural variation across sites
and ongoing
natural variation across sites
and ongoing
natural and human disturbance
processes led to differences in age,
processes led to differences in age,
density, size, and species of trees across a wide range of
sites. Notice
sites. Notice
the large trees and large fallen trunks on the right in the
diorama. Compare them with... Read More >
diorama. Compare them with... Read More >
1740 A.D.
For most of the New England
region, European settlement
occurred
region, European settlement
occurred
largely during the 18th century. Through forest clearing,
hunting, and
hunting, and
trapping, the abundance of many species changed rapidly
and the
and the
wilderness was gradually transformed into a domesticated
rural landscape.
rural landscape.
1830 A.D.
The peak of deforestation
and agricultural activity across
most of
and agricultural activity across
most of
New England occurred from 1830 to 1880. Across much
of New
of New
England, 60 to 80 percent of the land was cleared for pasture,
tillage, orchards and buildings. Small remaining areas of
woodland
woodland
were subjected to frequent cuttings for... Read More >
1850 A.D.
Beginning in the mid-1800s and continuing for more than a century, farming declined on a broad scale across New England. Abandoned pastures and fields rapidly developed into forests. In central Massachusetts and across much of central New England these forests were dominated by white pines. Read More >
1910 A.D.
As the "old-field" stands of white pine reached middle age, it became evident that they contained a valuable and rapidly growing crop of second-growth timber. As this white pine became marketable portable sawmills appeared across central New England. One of the most common and valuable uses of... Read More >
1915 A.D.
Clear-cutting of the "old-field" white pines led to the succession of mixed hardwoods across much of the landscape. The inability of white pine to sprout after being cut, in contrast to the prolific sprouting of our hardwood species, facilitated this succession. Patterns of succession enhanced the... Read More >
1930 A.D.
One of the characteristic features of the hardwood forest that developed after the clear-cutting of the "old-field" white pines is the predominance of multi-stemmed sprout clumps. Fast-growing species that sprout prolifically -- red oak, red maple, white ash, birches, and black cherry -- are... Read More >
1930 A.D.
One of the characteristic features of the hardwood forest that developed after the clear-cutting of the "old-field" white pines is the predominance of multi-stemmed sprout clumps. Fast-growing species that sprout prolifically -- red oak, red maple, white ash, birches, and black cherry -- are... Read More >
In the period since the dioramas were constructed, the trends in forest development illustrated in the 1930 model have continued. Remarkable expanses of maturing forest extend across a densely populated landscape in the northeastern United States.As these forests grow and mature and as dead and... Read More >
No comments:
Post a Comment