Another view on man made vs natural regeneration of forests.
An excerpt.
Another View: Replanting forests after wildfires unnecessary
By Chad Hanson - Special to the BeePublished 12:00 am PST Sunday, November 5, 2006
A recent article about reforestation suggests that areas burned in recent wildland fires have failed to naturally re-grow conifer saplings, and implies that intensive post-fire logging and artificial replanting are necessary.
However, even a cursory site visit to the Storrie fire, which was highlighted in the article, reveals that abundant natural conifer seedling and sapling growth is occurring on the burned national forest lands -- even in patches where most or all of the trees were killed by the fire -- as I have found in numerous field surveys.
The front-page photograph accompanying the article clearly shows numerous conifer saplings amongst the standing dead trees on the national forest land. The occasional clumps of brush in the photo are a species of ceanothus, which is a nitrogen-fixer. These plants replace soil nitrogen volatilized -- turned into gaseous form -- by the fire and help maintain soil productivity. The article makes the observation that this brush is somehow a problem.
The article's use of the private timberlands logged after the Storrie fire as an example of "restoration" is troubling. The Forest Service's own assessment found that these private lands, like the rest of the Storrie fire, burned predominantly at low and moderate severity. Yet they were nevertheless clear-cut by the private landowners shortly after the fire, removing countless live mature and old growth trees within spotted owl habitat across a vast area.
