Redwood Reader

This article was originally written about PL’s Watershed Analysis. But gloimalin is a prime factor in all watershed health issues, especially development. The impacts of development are known but relatively lightly regulated in terms of runoff and sediment at tine of building. Drainages are often changed and landscape destruction from running water is eventually inevitable. Expensive storm water systems supposedly do the work of a vegetated landscape but the water then rushes off to sea, lost to people and all other forms of life. Precipitation responsibility programs show great promise for future development.
Mattole residents have worked as hard as anybody to restore their river and its salmonid populations. For this reason there is now a large percentage of knowledgeable people who have witnessed landscape destruction from management and extreme weather events. Their observations and new science point out the problems with old protocols and why they keep areas at risk even when protections are put on them.
In the last few years the important role of mycorhizzia has become apparent on the landscape stability and nutrition scales, as well as the carbon cycle. In addition, the need for better management of precipitation is becoming apparent where summer low flows are complicating fisheries recovery. The regular drumbeat of new scientific findings continued on with the discovery of glomalin, a product of mycorhizzia responsible for soil aggregation that creates pore space for water storage and ease of root tip penetration.. We find new understanding of forests as communities with un-guessed at functions rolling merrily along even as we create new challenges for the system. But the important element here is the soil glue mechanism, for destruction of it is the source and cause of uphill sediment, which will wash into the stream before it re-grows into the landscape. Sediment that fills pools, causing scour along the stream banks, allowing sun to warm the now shallow waters; sediment that can liquefy in a heavy rain event and send entire hillsides sliding down hill; sediment that comes from dust as roads are driven in the dry season; sediment that is choking the estuary to a point of poor conditions in a necessary environment for Mattole fish, a public resource.
The presence and operations of mycorhizzia have been studied for about twenty-five years, but no mention is made in the Washington guidelines for watershed analysis. No attempt has been made to restore water storage on devastated hillsides, or to understand the reason sediment is cut loose in the landscape. And sediment is what we are talking about as far as watershed health is concerned. And while Redwood Science Labs knows something is wrong they can’t put a finger on the problem. The PNW Forest Mycorhizzia team has not yet added glomalin to its research and so we find we can answer all these questions if we can get scientists to read other scientists work in light of what we can see with our own eyes over the years. There is no classroom training for new information, but we now know sediment is kept in place by mycorhizzia producing glomalin adding root strength, hyphael structure and soil glue to the landscape.
The discovery of glomalin completes our understanding of forest stability in steep high rainfall watersheds because it answers all the questions found in the 1992 Washington guidelines of the Northwest Forest Plan, HCP’s, THP’s, NCWAP, CEQA, NEPA and Redwood Sciences Lab work at Caspar Creek. Landslides and mass wasting are readily explained and preventative measures appear. Low river flows are a direct result of watersheds shrinking in three dimensions, with less capacity in the dry season leading to fights over withdrawals when that is not the problem.
Luckily a brilliant lady working in crops has supplied us with the key to water retention and storage in soil systems that we can interpolate to forestry, which is about to undergo a revolution as big as the arrival of Caterpillars. Several teams of scientists are reporting regularly on many aspects of glomalin. Every issue of CO2 Science magazine, Nature and New Scientist reports new findings on atmospheric interplay between tree, fungi, soil, water and/or atmosphere. The revelations seem to all point to forests as self sustaining systems capable of far more important work than providing fiber, such as producing aerosol hydroxyl radicals that ameliorate carbon monoxide and ozone, have unrecognized ability to use atmospheric nitrogen in an enhanced carbon dioxide setting as well as intercepting and storing precipitation in soils for use in dry seasons and times of drought, disease and insect attack, and enhanced growth of plants, roots, shoots and fungi under enhanced CO2, and even rising temperatures.
The biggest revelations come from what destroys these very processes: sunlight, ambient air and running water, all primarily man caused today.. With about forty percent of sedimentation resulting from road building and the rest from clear felling according to Redwood Sciences Lab, we now have scientific explanations for failing landscapes, roads, streams and fisheries.
Since we are paying a lot of money to prevent and repair these very situations, it seems clear we need a new harvest protocol in the forest. It would need to protect the forest floor from unnecessary disruption, retain enough canopy to slow precipitation and shade and cool the ground,, leave enough trees to feed the carbon pools before they decay and the land further destabilizes which causes landslides and mass wasting years after insults have ended, and recognize the critical importance of the big trees in the role of atmospheric science.
These priorities create wildlife habitat and carbon sinks while thinning and select cutting provide jobs and resources as well as outdoor activity areas and reducing fire risk, providing quite a payload for the dollar. This new vision of the working forest provides plenty of room for sustainable economic activity.Road building and clear cutting leave long term impacts that remain at risk on site and downstream for
decades after work ceases. These will deliver sediment to the stream that will further compound water quality and habitat requirement problems at the estuary. This new information allows clarity of focus on keeping sediment out of creeks and PL’s commitment to Mattole Salmon Restoration efforts, especially regarding the Estuary. The last three years have been pretty good for fish and we hope that doesn’t have to
relapse as a result of operations.