How quickly are we re-growing timber?

[clearance]

Cut down thousands of them, the only good thing about dead pine is its light. I do not like climbing them, when you blow off a top it hits the ground, even a green lawn, and smashes into a thousand pieces. Falling them is sketchy, they are hard to wedge and the holding wood is no good.

Be carefull when you are cutting them down.

Its pretty bad, the scale of devastation is unreal. You can drive down the roads at high speed for hours and hours in this province and you will see endless red and grey trees.

 

[windthrown]

So, say in 2-4 years time, we will have a situation where the ENTIRE western north American continent is on fire? Like the San Diego fires, only 1,000 times bigger? :monkey:

Holy :censored:!

 

[smokechase II]

Snow as a fire predictor

"I do not know about the Bull Run area burning. Or the Bull of the Woods. The snow pack is really heavy up there right now. So it is not likely to happen this year."

----------

The 1910 Big Blow-up in Northern Idaho and Montana was following a heavy snow pack winter. (Bull Run snow is actually closer to normal than heavy snow right now. Isn't it?)
The 1910 fires were over 3 million acres in just over two days and they killed over 80 fire fighters. This was the big event that started the US Forest Service down the road to 'all fires are evil'.
They were weather sponsored, of course. Dry late spring and summer. Lightning starts with Cold Front dry and windy weather. Ranger Pulaski standing at the mine entrance keeping his men inside thereby saving most of their lives. The usual.

------------

Snow Pack is a notoriously poor predictor of fire seasons.
{There is even reason to believe that a heavier snow pack can support worse fire seasons from a moisture introduction/more thunderstorm/more lightning ignitions perspective. How dry the late spring and summer are is the important condition. If those are achieved and there was a heavier snow pack that still has substantial remnants in higher elevations we can get the moisture needed for thunderstorm build-ups. Not only does the forest need to be dry but we need the ignitions too.}

===========

Having said that.
Nobody can predict fire seasons. Until they are over.

**************

What matters with the ecosystems of Western Oregon/Washington is that huge stand replacement fires have occurred there. Prior to Anglo forestry and after. They can be regarded as worse than clear-cuts in some respects. One is their size.

Bull Run is going to burn.
History repeats.
How intensely it burns is a choice we have made.

 

[smokechase II]

Good point by Cedarkerf

Recreating a diverse mature forest can't be done simply by planting zillions of single species seedlings following a large clearcut. Just go look around Washington or Oregon at secondary (or third) growth in former clearcuts, it ain't pretty. It may be someday, not in our lifetimes.
-moss

----------------

Actually the opposite is true a lot of the time. alders maples, and others will fill in areas of a replanted clear cut but as the forest matures the conifers will take over and crowd everything else out. Go walk thru some of the big old growth on the Olympic peninsula and all you will see under the canopy are some scraggly rhododendrons here and there some ferns and a lot of moss.
- Cedarkerf

This isn't true in the forest of SW Oregon so much. They tend to be far more diverse even with older stands.

 

[Plasmech]

Disregarding cost/feasibility and just asking this for fun, is it possible to grow gigantic "old growth" type trees in a very short amount of time with serious irrigation and fertilization?

 

[smokechase II]

Yeah not really

My wife's folks planted some coast redwoods in their front lawn.

Lots of water year round.

At age 60 they have stumps close to 4.25 foot dbh.

But:
They are not that tall. Maybe almost a 100 foot.
The wood is not strong like old growth. Tight rings mean strength. Fast growth means weak.

Their roots have been hecck on the driveway and lawn.
They need to be cut down and sold as decking to some environmentalist building a 'green' home.

=============

Old growth is like ####ography - hard to define but you know it when you see it. A large diameter doesn't necessarily mean old growth.

 

[windthrown]

------------
Bull Run is going to burn.
History repeats.
How intensely it burns is a choice we have made.

Well, everything will burn eventually. The sun will engulf the earth when it becomes a red giant. In 4 billion more years. Logging now is in the tank though, so even if we did have a good logging forest plan, I do not think that there would be anything to pay for the logging with this year, nor any use for it, market-wise. Not that they are going to log the Bull Run area anyway. As for the snowpack, it has been snowing about 3 feet per week up at the 4,000 foot level on Hood in the past three weeks, and the snow levels are all well above average now. The trees up there at the lower elevations have really long leaders this year, meaning there is a lot of water available and the trees are happy. Bull Run is also on the north slope of Mt Hood, and remains a lot cooler than the south slope. Hood is also a water catch basin for the pacific storm track and it rains there even when it does not here. I am not loosing any sleep over the fate of Bull Run to a wildfire myself. Not that it matters, the water we get here is from the Tualatin wells. And if I had my way we would be logging a lot more than we are.

I would be far more worried about the dead stands of pines in the west. That area is massive. Bull Run is tiny in comparison. Dead trees in the great basin burning in a massive swath will be interesting. I cannot see how we will be able to stop that from happening. Never mind putting it out. That will be impossible.

 

[BC WetCoast]

Disregarding cost/feasibility and just asking this for fun, is it possible to grow gigantic "old growth" type trees in a very short amount of time with serious irrigation and fertilization?

Old growth usually is a term that describes not just the trees but the other characteristices of the stand (mosses, lichens, shrubs, animal usage etc). Yes, we can grow big trees with fertilizer and irrigation, but won't have the same stand characteristics.

 

[windthrown]

Actually the opposite is true a lot of the time. alders maples, and others will fill in areas of a replanted clear cut but as the forest matures the conifers will take over and crowd everything else out. Go walk thru some of the big old growth on the Olympic peninsula and all you will see under the canopy are some scraggly rhododendrons here and there some ferns and a lot of moss.
- Cedarkerf

This isn't true in the forest of SW Oregon so much. They tend to be far more diverse even with older stands.

I have to chime in with Cedarkerf in this one. At least in the entire coast range, and even the west slopes of the Cascades and Sierras all the way to California and even into the Cuyamuca Mountains above San Diego. My observations of tree stands is that the conifers will indeed crowd out the faster groing alders, bigleaf maples, chinkapins, and other trees over time if the habitat is right for them. They are invasive as all hell, and they will even crowd out older established stands of trees like oaks and madrones. I spent a good part of 2 years clearing grand and Doug firs from the understory below a stand of 400+ year old California white oaks and younger maples and madrones where I lived just east of Elkton. The oaks were up to 120 feet tall with a DBH up to 5 feet. The conifers were gaining 6 feet a year on them. Several of the oldest oaks and maples had been engulfed, and they are dead now. We had to decide which stands of oaks to save and which to let the conifers take over.

In researching the area, I found that the reason that the ancient oaks were there at all was becasue the Indians burned that area every fall for centuries. Then when they were forced out, the area was logged, and that 200 or so acre old farmstead was logged 4 times from 1875 through last year. They took the conifers, and left all the rest. That left a unique stand of mixed tree species for me to manage. The property is under invasion from two major forces; one was a growing stand of Doug fir to the west side, and the other was an even faster advancing stand of grand firs on the south. Where water is scarcer, like into the hotter areas of the Umpqua, Rogue and Klamath basins, as well as the central valley of California, Ponderosa pines are more common, along with oaks. Those areas are resistant to conifer invasions, and attempts to plant fir trees there have commonly failed. But my point is here that wherever there is good habitat for conifers, they will invade and crown out all the other species of trees, except other tall conifers.

Here are some photos of some examples of what I am yaking about here. They are a mixed oak stand of mostly California black oaks, some Oregon white oaks and a few madrones. The invading trees here are a mix of grand and Doug firs. The oaks here in these photos are about 100 feet tall. The firs are anywhere from zero to about 60 feet tall. These are natural invading trees, self sown. This area was never replanted after any of the previous cuts. Rainfall that I measured there from 2004 to 2008 was between 60-120 inches of rain a year. Elevation is about 600 feet.

 

[smokechase II]

That's my story and I'm sticking to it

"This isn't true in the forest of SW Oregon so much. They tend to be far more diverse even with older stands."

Cedarkerfs point on much of the wet side being mono species has merit.

My point is that not all of it is. SW Oregon in particular.

A key side issue here is that the diverse stands, where present, do have a far greater resistence to devastating events like insect, disease and fire. One thing that was re-learned from the SW Oregon large fires is that it is hard to sustain a crown fire when hardwoods are mixed in. The hillsides full of fir not so. They turn to toast pretty easy. Scatter tree species throughout that do not have the energy release and just pockets torch or crown.

It is common for most of these large fires to have less to well less than 50% of their burned acreage be lower intensity. Pockets of five and thirty acres killed but not the massive stand replacement events in 500 - 1000 acre areas.

When looking over the aftermath of a large fire on TV note that homogenous stands are the ones most likely to be removed by fire.

----------------------

Difference between the Tillamook burns was they were stand replacement and at very high percentage. A reason for that was there ignitions timing and locations. All of the Tillamook burns were started by loggers in areas being salvaged by a prior burn.

One needs to look at these burns as really 2-3 events per cycle.

In the case of all the Tillamook burns it was two events.
1) the first fire,
2) the second fire. (East-side in this era adds the insect/disease event at #1)

First fire kills lots.
Snags from the first fall over onto new growth,
Second fire has a great fuel bed.
Second fire roars along in a reburn area then takes out a newer unburned area too.
Loggers salvage that and start another fire.
There were five Tillamook burns - six years apart - and yes humans are prone to not learn from their mistakes.

==================

Here is just part of the history of that Tillamook burns prior to the logging fires:
"In 1918 the Cedar Butte fire burned about 40,000 acres all within the perimeter of the future Tillamook Burn (Figure 8 shows the extent and
location of the 1918 Cedar Butte Fire with respect to the 1933 Tillamook Fire). In 1931 a 40 square mile area of trees near the Tillamook-
Washington county line was destroyed, and in October of 1932 near the origin point of the Tillamook fire about 200 acres was burned. (Bunting, 1997. Morris, 1935). Thus it can be seen that fire was no stranger to this area
prior to 1933."
So assuming that making loggers be safer or shut down isn't the answer. These areas will burn over and over.

 

[smokechase II]

Obervations

"My observations of tree stands is that the conifers will indeed crowd out the faster groing alders, bigleaf maples, chinkapins, and other trees over time if the habitat is right for them."

===========

My thoughts would be that the important component of habitat that allows for this is the removal of fire.

When we make changes to an ecosystem there are repercussions.

Look above at the fir comin in under the oak.
Picture the regular introduction of fire (the Native American thing as stated) by any source being the control. There very probably was enough fire by nature prior to Native Americans to do the same stand thinning.
(We don't know - understood - just a reasonable guess - thanks for the lee-way)

 

[smokechase II]

No need to wait for a supernova

"Well, everything will burn eventually."

The key point here is that large stand replacement fires in Western Oregon occur in much faster timeframes.

They don't have to be as fast as Eastern Oregon to be of importance.

Also, again.
The snowpack and early spring moisture are notoriously poor predictors of fire seasons. Late spring and particularly summer moisture can allow for ignitions to do their thing.

Bull Run doesn't have to burn every year to be a concern.
(In fact if it did, it would be better off.)
All it has to do is stand replacement burn every 100 - 300 years (and be overdue currently - plenty of fuel) to be worth paying attention to.

 

[Plasmech]

We should go into other countries under the protection of the military and take THEIR trees. God knows most of them take enough stuff from us...

 

[windthrown]

Well the area I lived in (and the photos are from) is considered SW Oregon. And the firs there are by far the most aggressive/invasive of tree species. Alders are by far the fastest to re-establish themselves, but they are rapidly overgrown by the firs and cedars. After a road clearing, alders came in by the thousands. Lots of invasive species as well; blackberry, brooms, and hawthorne were the biggest headache to remove.

It was impossible for us to discern what was 'natural' diversity. It was one of the few 100+ acre places around there with a mixed stand of trees. The mixed stand on that property was deliberately planted, created by logging, or by fires by the Indians. The topography varied, and there were hot areas that favored madrones, draws that favored red cedars, flat flood plain creek areas that favored ash and alders and oaks, and meadows that had oaks but were reverting to firs. The rest was fir, mainly Dougs and grands. There are some huge first growth stumps and logs that are still there. Mostly Doug fir. My own survey of several 80-160 acre old growth BLM tracts near there were mainly a mix of conifers, mostly Doug fir, some cedars and grand fir, and a few alders, madrones, and bigleaf maples. No hemlocks or pines are in that area now.

Going back in time, the area was logged and replanted or farmed from about 1880 on. Before that the Indians burned almost every fall and lived in the area for several hundreds of years, or more. David Douglas made a good survey of that area in about 1860, and noted a thickly forested area that was near impossible to travel though due to the tangle of vine maples and steep terrain. However, that was after the Indians had been there for many centruies previous. Looking farther back requires fossil records. Coastal redwoods and other trees now extinct were common there in fossil records, and Ponderosa pines were far far more common toward the coast.

In the end, we decided to clear out the firs under the large oaks to preserve the anceint Indian burning features of the property. That area is about as far north as Califirnia black oaks grow, and they are critical trees for habitat of several species of wildlife. We also cleared the firs to make the oaks more fire-proof. A fire through there with the firs as shown in the photos would have killed the oaks. We set aside about 10 acers of those oaks and meadows in the forest Rx plan. The locals thought that we were nuts; everyone said that we should plant Doug firs, or let the firs crown out those old 'trash trees'. It would be very interesting to see if the area were left alone for 500 years what would happen over time. Random fires, and invasive species, and all the rest. At best it is a war zone between plant species. I think that in the end, the firs would win hands down though.