Posted on 08/29/2011 3:57:54 PM PDT by SandRat
t may have taken the largest wildfire in Arizona history, but for the first time in decades, environmentalists and government officials agree on a key element of future forest management.
The U.S. Forest Service said in a report this month that “intense thinning treatments” can ease future wildfires, by removing trees between six and 18 inches in diameter to allow for additional space between trees.
“Everyone agrees that a lot of the dry forest types need to be treated in terms of removing the vegetation,” said Morris Johnson, a research ecologist with the Forest Service and co-author of the report.
Intense thinning, according to the report, is reducing stands to leave 50 to 100 trees per acre. The study provides scientific grounds for continuing the practice of thinning heavily forested areas, showing that “the model and the reality match,” said Shaula Hedwall of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
(Excerpt) Read more at svherald.com ...
Intense thinning, according to the report, is reducing stands to leave 50 to 100 trees per acre.
Remember folks an acre is not that big, consider
your house lot if it’s even an acre with 50 or
100 trees on it.
I live smack dab in the middle of a national forest. They (forest service) care more about Salmon than people. We have pine beetles bad here. They do nothing about that. Someday this place will burn as well if nothing is done about it.
Time to put trails into these woods...aka...logging roads.
Forest fires kill. No reason folks can't live in a clearing. We need more hermits.
50 to 100 trees is ridiculous....
They didn’t specify
As if the 10 million acres and $100 BILLION that the Healthy Forests Initiative will do a damned thing when faced with 190 million acres at risk oif catastrophic fire.
Consider how hard it has been to get people to the point of even considering that there MIGHT be a problem with government environmental management. Most of them think it can be fixed by changing managers even though they KNOW that it's a university brainwashed civil service bureaucrats in cahootz with crooked judges and an army of equally brainwashed NGO lawyers backed by the richest foundations in the country!
So, what do you think it's going to take to get our unconscious public past the next step? When told how and why it is in reality a structural problem, they start whining in futility because the problem is the system that gave them the goodies they wanted.
Then there's the next step after that one, and it's much harder.
When told what it's going to take to fix it, taking risks, study, hard work, and embracing accountability when faced with hard facts, they recoil in fear. That's just how it is. As I have traveled the country speaking to the people who should be begging to hear what I'm telling them, that they must take the leap to cut the legs out from under the system else they will lose EVERYTHING, it's always been the same.
They want somebody else to take the risk and make it easy for them.
Taking care of nature is hard work. It's expensive, but somebody HAS to do it unless we want watersheds running with mud, houses burning to ashes or falling down hills, and wildlands choked with poisonous weeds. If we want an economy with ANY industry left, if they want jobs at all, SOMEBODY is going to have to produce the raw material upon which industry must run and SOMEBODY must keep those in the resource extraction businesss honest. If we aren't going to have that job done by an unaccountable and out-of-control bureaucracy whose hands are tied by the very lawyers to whom its beholden, then SOMEBODY has to make a profit doing that work.
That's where my system comes in. Unfortunately Dave, I can't even get people pay attention long enough to understand the question, much less get them to master the answers. I'm not giving up, there is a plan I'll be working on this winter, but if I didn't love my land so much, I'd go crazy.
Deja vu all over again.
So, what did I do? Well, not only did I get my environmental management business method patent to give me standing in regulatory cases, ten years of arduous labor has produced the purest restored native plant habitat to be found in perhaps all of North America in order to develop the cred to go with it. I have been asked to publish the results of our project, the methods, and observations in academic journals with which to extend that cred to documented and peer reviewed expertise. It's cost me time and money no one here can appreciate, yet I can't do all this alone. Who is going to help get the word out?
I wrote (essentially the same argument) back in 1967 for an in-house University (CAL) publication.
Common sense is timeless.
Bonnicksen estimates pre-Columbian forest density in that region somewhere between 15-45 trees per acre. Sic:
The Policy: A Burning Desire, A Critique of the Sierra Club Public Lands Fire Management Policy (1999)
The Warning: Crisis on our National Forests Reducing the Threat of Catastrophic Wildfire [San Bernardino Fires]
An Example of the Consequences: The Winter Fire
this is a no brainer....the reason that Yellowstone burned so heavily many years ago was that there was tons of underbrush and tree growth because of years of fire supression....
Any SERIOUS forestry degree holder knows that “Old Growth” forests are an anomaly. Forests either burn down, die of disease, are killed by bugs, or are harvested by loggers. Small stands of “Old Growth” are out there, but are statistically insignificant, and usually the result of human intervention or plain dumb luck.
Dittos for “Oak Savannah” in Oregon. The ONLY WAY YOU GET OAK SAVANNAH, is by setting fire to the valley floor and burning scrub brush. THAT IS WHAT THE NATIVE AMERICANS DID IN THE WILLAMETTE VALLEY IN OREGON! They wanted to increase grassland area for more big game. This is an archeological FACT.
I just returned from Yosemite and they have a controlled burn program that has been ongoing since 1971. This seems to be focused on the roadside and populated areas which I assume is an attempt to minimize the damage caused by the “It’s OK to toss your cigarette out the car window” crowd. In addition they conduct controlled burns of those forest areas where the big redwoods grow.
But they still have forest fires in the Yosemite area including one just last week.
Amazing !! Accounts/diaries of early vistors to western forests -used to dense eatern mixed hardwood forest - were amazed at how “park-like” they were. (Hence “Park” figures in some many name locations they decreed. )
In the circumstances described fire served to clean up dead drop converting its nutrients in to ready fertilizer for new seedlings. Frequent burns meant any fire didn’t grow hot enough to bother healthy trees but killed the diseased.
Now the watermelons are laying claim to “inventing” a conservation method Dame Nature created a million+ years ago. >PS
I dont know...well
If you want to know how to find the BSA of a woodlot you can do this.
Take a dime and hold it about 24 inches from your eye width way. Then count each tree that is as wide or wider than that dime. Times the total by 10 and that gives you the BSA of that area. BSA=Basil Square Feet per Area.
In some regions, the BSA should be 70, in others lower. Like AZ where it should be real low. In some forests (Hardwoods for example), If the BSA is over 70, then you need to cut some out to lower the BSA to about 70.
In the northern Hardwood Forest, depending on the hardwood class, I like to see it at 60 for a class ‘A’ stand-that is a stand with mixed mature/young trees. In a young stand, 70. This is something I have argued about with foresters for years now..especially now since the youngsters think they know it all since they have learned it out of a book.
You need to do several plots around the lot and average it out to find the Average BSA. Take plots on thick areas and plots on thin.
I got 45 years in the business and have worked in AZ for a year near Flag doing those cuts. One was next to the Fairgrounds..Fort, or whatever they called it-I cant remember the name-The Lake Mary Road we did another. Worked up in the Bradshaws near Prescott by the YMCA camp also-the Old Senate road I think they called it.
Some timber types require clear cut- Most Aspen and many softwoods. Oak does best with a darn good cut.
Its all in the experience a person has.
BTW, didn’t they try this idea out in Yellowstone a few years back with less than stellar results.
I don’t think so. The entire expanse of the East Entrance to Yellowstone park has been destroyed by bark beetle infestation. The West side in 88 was destroyed by massive fire.
The Forest Service/Park Service plan is no touchy. Very few logs were removed from the fire area, and just looking at it back in 88 the amount of wood consumed/ruined, could have built a log home for a huge amount of people, but our wood was allowed to go up in smoke, and then rot. Not much has changed since except to add wolves to the mix. Frankly, the park should be intensely logged, hunted, snowmobiled, mined for minerals, belonging to the state of Wyoming, touristed, and people ought to be able to feed chipmunks appropriate food. Feed bears at your own risk.
Get someone the define “OLD GROWTH”. When they go on and on I always ask if Old Growth would be over 5 thousand years old. They will say, Yup. Then I say go to see the Bristlecone pines. The ugliest trees you ever saw.
“Then count each tree that is as wide or wider than that dime.”
Do you look in all directions or choose just the area in front of you to do this?
360 degrees to point of beginning.
It used to be the standard. Since the feds gutted American logging, no one is keeping up the roads, and there is no heavy equipment in place (all that was provided by the logging community because of timber sales, which community is now nearly non-existent). So now, there is no choice but to let 250,000 acres a year (avg just here where I live over the last decade or so), instead of turning it all into useable lumber. And since no one is logging out beetle killed patches, the beetles are now having there way with it all.
What the feds did here in the Rockies was criminal. The saw mills are all gone, and with them went the logging trucks, the skidders and cats, and all the really good paying logging jobs... not to mention the logistics necessary for fighting fires.
for the first time in decades, environmentalists and government officials agree on a key element of future forest management.
I’ll believe this when hell freezes over.
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