Notes on a Meeting of the Landscape Committee of the Jackson Advisory Group, February 4, 2009
Introduction
This is the second in a related series of documents on applying the concept of “Natural Forestry” at Jackson State Forest. The concept is introduced and defined in Part 1. The key idea behind Natural Forestry is simultaneously managing redwood forests for restoration toward old growth and continued timber harvesting.
The term Natural Forestry refers to emulating natural forest processes in management methods. Two aspects of natural processes in redwood forests are 1) trees grow to be many hundreds, even thousands of years old, and 2) over time, the number of trees in an area decline while the sizes of the remaining trees increase. Thus, Natural Forestry would selectively harvest smaller trees (”thin from below”) repeatedly, leading over time to increasingly older and larger trees, eventually to old growth conditions.
Part 1 reported on initial conversations among three experts who generally gave enthusiastic support to exploring the concept of Natural Forestry.
The present document contains notes compiled by Vince Taylor on a meeting of the Landscape Committee of the Jackson Advisory Group. This meeting followed the initial conversations reported in Part 1. The term Natural Forestry originated in this meeting, as participants discussed the applying the principles of Natural Forestry to a large majority of Jackson Forest. The notes were not intended as a comprehensive record of the meeting, but aimed to capture the various viewpoints espoused by the participants.
Landscape Committee Meeting, February 4, 2009
Participants: Brad Valentine (Co-chair), Mike Jani (Co-chair), Kathy Bailey, Linda Perkins, Forest Tilley, Vince Taylor, Marc Jameson (JDSF Manager)
The following are my recollection of the points made at the meeting about the proposal, initially from Mike Jani at this meeting, but generally following the thrust of the points made in email correspondence circulated by Vince Taylor [contained in Part 1]. The correspondents were Steve Sillett, Mike Fay, and Ken Fisher. The major theme of the letters was that using “light touch” or “thin from below” silviculture could be continued to be used over hundreds of years, and that this was a preferred management strategy for multiple objectives, including timber production, habitat, and restoration of redwood forests to the old growth condition that is the natural state of redwood forests.
Mike Jani termed the application of this strategic approach to management, “Managing the forest to emulate natural forest processes,” or “Natural Forestry” for short.
The key elements of Natural Forestry are that silvicultural applications would be designed to continually grow stands to higher volumes and larger tree diameters, would allow some portion of trees to grow indefinitely larger, and timber harvesting would continue without stopping.
Linda had earlier reiterated the concept in the book “Ecoforestry,” of managing forests so that forests over time would attain their natural age. This concept is inherent in the strategy of Natural Forestry.
I suggested that the idea of “recovery” should be incorporated in the definition, because we are dealing with forests that are all very far from their “natural”, pre-logging state.
I offer the following possible definition:
Natural Forestry is the management of forests to produce timber while simultaneously fostering the forests’ return to their natural age and structural state.
Mike offered that the principles contained in Natural Forestry were principles of the Guild. Linwood nodded assent.
Mike would like to know the extent of natural variations in redwoods – how much and how geographically distributed of different seral stages. He offered the opinion that “We all know how much young forest existed in the untouched redwood stands. Very little.”
Kathy expressed that the forests were now far from their natural state, but that there is a “natural recovery process” going on. We need to be careful not to interfere with that process in an undesirable way.
Linwood brought up the issue of the allocations of different seral classes in Table 4 of the Management Plan.
Mike replied that he had looked at this table, and taking the maximum latitude within the table, one could apply Natural Forestry to 80% of the land and still fit within the table. After this, 80% became a kind of “base case” for discussion.
Kathy noted that all of the preserves and areas highly restricted for management (e.g., Class I stream zones) would be in the 80%.
John Helms said he found the concept of Natural Forestry very appealing, but was uncertain how much of the forest should be managed this way.
Vince said that his idea was that Natural Forestry should be the “default” landscape designation. Then, uses that were inconsistent with NF would be identified and justified, and sufficient geography to provide for these would be removed from the NF designation. Uses that Vince identified were:
- ·Reserves in which no management would take place
- ·Areas devoted to demonstration and research on management methods that were not compatible with NF, e.g., even-age management
As people expressed various concerns, there emerged a clear consensus that we need to do some modeling and explorations of the implications of natural forestry for:
1. Volume of timber production over time. Can it continue at a constant to increasing rate perpetually, or is volume bound to fall off?
2. How will the economics (costs) of timber production be affected relative to standard management practices?
[Related to the second item, after the meeting Linwood raised the issue of trees getting so large that getting them out of the forest with modern techniques and equipment could become impractical. Further, current mills could not handle logs of the size that would become “normal” harvest in a hundred or so years.
Linwood’s questions raised the question of whether their should be some limit on tree size in actively managed portions of the forest, so all trees reaching this limit would be cut. Vince wasn’t happy with this idea, because it would negate the concept of actively managing forest stands all the way back to natural old growth. Exploring these issues and questions would appropriately occur under Question 2, above.]
There was a good discussion of public and private rates of return and their influence on “economical” timber management, but it is too complex to summarize. Vince argued that if you could show that Jackson Forest could provide a constant to growing volume of timber production over time, that would satisfy the economic requirements for a publicly owned forest.
Vince suggested a second principle, which after discussion, evolved into two additional principles to accompany Natural Forestry:
1. The volume of timber harvested from Natural-Forestry managed areas should be non-declining over time, measured for the forest as a whole.
2. The inventory volume of Natural-Forestry managed areas should be non-declining over time, within each watershed so managed.
Sentiment was expressed for another management principle, not related to landscape allocation, but generally agreed to be valuable:
- There should be an even annual flow of logs, subject to variation because of market conditions.
The group began a discussion of principles to apply in establishing allocations that would subtract or be outside of Natural Forestry areas. This discussion was interrupted before the group could come to any general agreement, but the following thoughts were put out:
- Demonstrations inconsistent with Natural Forestry would be within designated R&D areas, such as those specified in the Management Plan, but perhaps with boundaries adjusted.
- Research could occur anywhere on the forest, but when inconsistent with Natural Forestry would be done on the smallest scale consistent with scientific validity.
- Dan Porter’s Hexagon methodology could help in identifying areas for preserves.
- Principles are needed for specifying location and amounts of preserves.
- Allocation of areas for younger trees would be determined by needs of the to TBD demonstration and research program.
What these linear notes don’t capture was the sense some of us felt that using Natural Forestry (even though still a somewhat amorphous concept) as a default management strategy on most of the forest was a breakthrough. There are still a lot of questions that need to be answered and concerns addressed, but Natural Forestry seems like a strategy that could be defined in such a way that it could bring the JAG to consensus on its most difficult charge.
If we do reach consensus on a management approach that will put the forest on a steady path toward old growth while continuing harvests at levels generally considered acceptable, Jackson Forest will become a beacon of hope for forestry around the world. It will truly become a world class forest.
