Old growth seems to be the above.. not the below..
We were discussing how forest policy in the US seems to have been in the hands of people living in mesic forests. It’s interesting to look at who exactly counts as an expert on, say, mature and old growth (wouldn’t that be almost all forests?) , and where they are located. While the Yale Forest School folks were developing this series, I suggested that they get someone from the Interior West. I suppose Sue Pritchard and SJ are at least over the crest of the Cascades, but PJ people, I guess, need not apply. In the old bad days, this country didn’t count because it didn’t produce lumber. Now it still seems.. not part of the MOG conversation.
According to this fact sheet,
Pinyon and juniper woodlands are the most abundant forest type in the federal inventory of mature and
old-growth forests, with 9 million acres of old-growth pinyon-juniper across BLM and Forest Service
lands and an additional 14 million acres of mature pinyon-juniper.
Anyway, the talks are recorded and here is the list of speakers and where to register.
Tom Spies (9/12): answering the question “Have OG forests in PNW declined at a greater rate the last 30 yrs due to fire than would have occurred had logging continued at 4BBF/yr?”
NO… continued logging at historic rates would have eliminated virtually all OG outside Wilderness. Recent fires (esp 2018 on) have hit OG but we still have MUCH MORE on the landscape due to NW Forest Plan…
Spies has a strong bias to support his pronouncements from the 1980s and 90s. Plantations have been coming online the past 30 years that should be managed, while meantime, thousands of acres of old-growth have burned. The “continued logging at historical rates” is a qualifying statement based on personal values that has no real meaning. Career professionals I have known and talked with since those times would strongly disagree with Spies’ assertion. Politics, economics, and salvage can’t be predicted, but all are critical components aspects that need to be strongly considered when trying to make these types of conjecturing.
Simple proposition BZ… “continued logging at historic rates”, all things being equal; Spies is simply saying that logging regime of 1980s projected forward would have eliminated more OG than fires since NWFP. I agree w/o reservation.
The point is often made among TSW contributors that the Plan has “been a failure” particularly due to loss of owls, and OG (to fire). But it’s important to recognize that not all OG fire losses can be “blamed” on the Plan, nor owl (barred owl). PNW forests and streams might be very different, and ecologically worse off, w/o the Plan.
I have enjoyed the 3 presentations in the series so far. I appreciated that Spies reviewed the history of the definitions used in the PNW. Spies was a little disappointing today because he seemed a little out of touch with some things – he was not aware that emerald ash borer has been in Oregon for at least 3 years now and he was not as current on the role of cultural burning, something one of his former students, Andrew Merschel has been working to include in his old growth research.
I haven’t listened to the presentation, but I think you are exactly right. Merschel is doing very good tree ring research, but his mentor’s lack of understanding of fire history and cultural burning patterns creates an inaccurate basis for computer modeling. This has been a serious problem in the understanding of historical “critical habitat” patterns when creating regulations, and hopefully Merschel’s work — and that of others — will help correct this costly misdirection.