Redwood Reader

24. Beginning of the End for Restoration
Humboldt County’s various restoration efforts are beginning to show their effects. The gradual decline in overall logging has been beneficial to species and systems. In 1988, California produced 80% of its own lumber. Today that number is down to 20%. There are many reasons for this starting with the fact that forests near developed areas are being cut for space, not timber. Canadian lumber drove down demand. Inability to assure endangered species of habitat caused the Forest Service to implement the Northwest Forest Act. Environmentalists, aghast at the destruction of resources, legally challenged many land use plans. Good examples abound in oak country, where the wood has value as firewood or small amounts of custom sawn hardwood but not to lumber companies.
It has taken a long time for California to recognize the importance of its oak habitats. The first test plantings are less than ten years old. Now Sudden Oak Death is here and we really have little to go on about the role of oaks. And now even more importantly we have discovered that oaks fill the same role as conifers in higher rainfall areas, condition the soil by feeding glomalin producing fungi, provide canopy to intercept rainfall and block ultraviolet from reaching the fungi, create duff to protect the fungi, store water in the root zone, provide shelter and food for wildlife. Oaks have the same plethora of mycorhizzia associations as Douglas fir, but conifers prefer 30 or more inches of rain while oaks do best in drier 15-30 inch range. There are eleven million acres of oaks in California.
Spacing in oak lands is to be considered. For lack of a better example let us propose, in a general way, that the rooting system of a species is reflected in the shape of the crown. Since many parameters in tree growing use the edge of the drip line, especially for feeding, meaning that is where the feeder roots are located, this seems a reasonable model. Oaks are relatively widely spaced with sunlight reaching the ground between trees and in winter. I think often of Oregon white oaks growing on bare southwestern slopes with four foot trunks, 60 feet in height with crowns 150 foot in diameter. We find pipimg here but no slides. These trees are constantly being threatened by Douglas fir incursion, fatal for the oaks because common mycorhizzia for the fir is parasitic on oaks. Thus one reason the Indians need to burn to protect the staple of their diet, the acorn. White oak seems to struggle in the moist climate of Humboldt County, better stands are seen east of here and this is probably why. Since it is rugged for the trees, one wonders how much of they may have been introduced by traveling natives. It seems likely they would at least select better acorn cropping trees. This may be what happened in drier areas that did not support tan oak, the major acorn of the Coast tribes. It is also possible different cultures emphasized different strategies over time. In the Larrabee Buttes area Non-Gatl people were known to be remnants of earlier Native settlers that were being impinged by Wintun and other ascending tribes. While there is plenty of tanoak, there is no record of tanbarking and a lot of manicured white oak trees with large acorns on the south and southwestern aspects. These Indians may have been forced to live with what they had, or they may have been a remnant of a culture with different management needs, styles and goals.
Shortly before I began this blog a Crescent City man was honored for devising the plan to restore fish spawning habitat by surveying and replacing all the major culverts on the North Coast. This single action opens about one hundred miles of spawning habitat fish had been cut off from, a major step in restoring North Coast fisheries. We hope habitat restoration on those creeks is not too far behind for those areas needing it. A plan to remove sediment from smaller streams can improve coho and steelhead spawning grounds and remove major sources of sediment from traveling through the system, and allowing the larger flows an opportunity to flush their main channels, and scour out deeper pools, and redefine their channels. More landscape wide restoration projects are coming online, such as the Mattole River and Range Partnership, a thirty year plan for recovery of the Mattole watershed, with a five year implementation to begin and monitoring to follow. The Mattole region has taken the lead in many restoration fields, partly because it is small and remote enough picture entirely restored, the extent of the problem is obvious and the people are willing. While natural re-growth and atmospheric fertilization with CO2 is fixing many problems on its own, great advantage comes from directing the growth into forest trees both in later value and in forest system restoration. Atmospheric fertilization and re-vegetation cannot restore failing banks to slopes of repose, but can stop mass wasting on exposed soils by re-vegetation provided glomalins conditions are met. We need more tree planting and some in stream machine work. Once land managers are aware of the basic rule of thumb about glomalin production and storage, it will be a simple step to adjust harvesting to protect these vital systems and recovery will be complete even as the forests remain profitable. More private land will be restored to the timber base as private owners finally see a system that can improve the forestland they own, protect it from fire risk and slides, and not scar it up in the process.
This amounts to a period of mass restoration and should be compacted to allow the healing to be in step with management goals. The hope is that more land will become available for forest systems which provide sustainable incomes and jobs without causing degradation, ending the need for restoration funding and public acquisition of timber lands for habitat protection.
We will need some new technology in the woods but the mills are already set to run small wood. The fish will come back to restored accessible habitat almost by accident. Many people will be working in the woods lowering fire danger by creating shaded fuel breaks, especially in the urban interface zones. Restoration people have learned a good deal about land use, and could turn their attention to sustainable agricultural systems consistent with their principles of recovery and sustainability. In this way we can smoothly transition into more intensive agroforestry programs, ensuring a rural economy hope and opportunity.