Redwood Reader

Redwood Reader has been calling for new ways of looking a forest and watershed issues since its inception. Today’s papers bring good articles on two aspects we have been dealing with- community forestry and managed wild lands for faster return of late seral forest conditions. The first article deals with new ways of using forest resources in a sustainable manner that benefits local communities, like the Arcata Community Forest. It is a new concept in the East but fairly common in the Third World, where the designation is easy but implementation is difficult, especially over the time scales needed for forest regrowth.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/04/national/04conserve.html?th&emc=th It is ironic this article is from the New York Times, and the place they go to is timberland formerly owned by Plum Creek Timber, the company Robert Manne left to head Pacific Lumber here in Humboldt. We see they sold 88,000 acres of land to conservationists, presumably after it was cut, since they seem happy to be done with it. Once again writers are surprised by the coalition that developed to make it happen, but these coalitions are the only way enough interest and resources get focused on these issues. As we have stated repeatedly, buying land to preserve it limits the amount you will be able to buy, prevents repairs and improvements, decreases the tax base, limits job opportunities and new ideas and often provides recreation opportunities that go underutilized due to remoteness, requires state or federal agencies to hold title for management and law enforcement as well as for duration. We are not talking wilderness here, functional landscapes have to be the goal.
Communities have demanded their right to a share in their own indigenous resources. Environmental health and local jobs are critical components of community forestry efforts that regional owners can provide for compared to bottom line driven overly capitalized and centralized heavy industry. Then the forest resources go back to all the forest resources and not just timber- water quality, air cleaning, carbon sequestering, biodiversity, wild life habitat, fire risk reduction, and the peace of the forest.
How to get there is clarified to some extent by the Times-Standard article,
http://www.times-standard.com/local/ci_3000354. This is a major focus of my blog, as well as BLM planning for Headwaters Forest, and King Range and Gilham Butte in the Redwood to the Sea Wildlife Corridor. These prescriptions allow the formation and functioning of the mycorhizzia and glomalin deposition which results reduced sedimentation and clean water, and better late summer flows, in short, better habitat. There are restrictions on commercial harvest of timber on these lands. A better model finds use for the huge amount of vegetation that would be removed if this became the general management concept and creates jobs, and more importantly, cash flow for stewards and communities. Careful select cutting over large acreages then could be sustained indefinitely without widespread sedimentation but below the rate at which road building is profitable, forcing less destructive methods of extraction.
Mr. Hartley rightly points out late seral conditions are relatively easy to replicate through management treatments, especially early in the growth cycle of new stands, up to about 80 years. It is a lot easier to deal even earlier because there is so much less volume to dispose of. It also allows the trees to take immediate advantage of minerals, water and light. Douglas fir, in particular, will often recolonize an area with thousands of seedlings. Eventually they will thin down to a few hundred very large trees with some second growth scattered around, and a huge fuel load of dead and broken trees and limbs. Douglas fir was planted in place of redwoods because it will provide sawlogs much faster than redwood seedlings. But Douglas fir is not as long lived, does not stump sprout, has minimal fire resistance, and dies if the root crown is buried in silt. So there are very good reasons to plant redwood, especially near streams, and a few interplanted among Douglas fir to be left as leave trees will give stability to the landscape over the long term. We also have suggested studies of using redwood trees as screens across feeder creeks, using fire resistance and water retention as windbreaks to prevent fires from using side creeks as chimneys, and for catching and retaining sediment in flooding. Shade and moisture together with reduced fuel loads and spacing will give a measure of reduced fire risk.
An issue I have been slow getting to is the role of bacteria in the formation of our soil water storage unit. This week New Scientist reported a probable ten fold increase in the number of species due to restructuring the method of sampling soil bacteria used to determine the number of species. Bacteria take us a further step down in the reductionist thread here, with one of the earliest things I read about mycorhizzia was that the hyphae provided safe haven for beneficial bacteria. Another tantalizing statement I read said the role of bacteria in aggregating soils through production of sticky substances was well understood. There has been a large interest in biofilms recently as well, often created by large quantities of similar cells and giving a colony of single cell organisms some properties of multicellular organisms. We begin to see how an assemblage of very small creatures can create an amazing thing like a watershed if there is a common need and a collective benefit, and a resource to work with. Once the bacteria with chlorophyll teamed up with the dependant workhorse fungi, the two could fix carbon and release oxygen and develop better mechanisms for such basic needs as light gathering, water and nutrient collection by growing bigger plants, deepening roots, aggregating soil and storing water for use in dry times. We often see life appear by the simple addition of water due to endemic seeds and spores.
Bacteria communicate their abundance, which often acts as a population control measure. Fungi are known to communicate via pheromone and probably control abundance and succession in any given area. It probably is the mechanism that determines which mycorhizzia appear in a stand as it ages, without old growth types heavily suppressing other types through this network, in undisturbed areas. Shade may also play a critical role in fungi activity.
A recent show about microbiologists on PBS had scientists collecting soil samples from beneath Douglas fir in Vancouver. You could see the glomalin but they were far more concerned with bacterial differences and soil differences in a very small area. They were sampling by old stumps as well, thus missing the living influence of the tree on the soil. Nevertheless, interesting work again stating how difficult it is to grow natural dependant species in laboratory conditions, just as the mycologists studying mycorhizzia have found. Most cultivated mushrooms feed on dead plant material and can be cultivated but mycorhizzia are dependant on a primary producer they have a special relationship with.
We also saw Russian scientists sampling for altered soil microbes outside Chernobyl Number Four in pine test plots, hoping to find altered microbes producing new antibiotics. They were actually succeeding with primitive equipment and conditions. But a click of the channel and there was an Indian women fighting Monsanto over the company’s patenting native plants of Indian agriculture in their continued quest to corner agricultural seed markets. Another scientist was very worried over genes escaping into the natural world. His argument was a genetically altered salmon that grew to five pounds in the first year could escape. Its offspring would out compete native fish and ensure his bloodline. After forty generations all trace of the wild fishes DNA had vanished and a newer, larger fish was established in the wild without benefit of the test of time, and limited in genetic variability, the basis of adaptability. One last thought is that maybe that “problem salmon” grew fast enough to evade predators like the pike-minnow in wild conditions.
In the future we will need the products of forest more than ever. A new viewpoint in which we live within the natural law can provide all we need but cannot sustain artificial rates of activity based on debt. Any patch of woods provides to the public good through air cleaning, shade, soil protection and preciptitation control for a vast region. This is not anything new, it is that resources are now running low and we have seen what happens when we ignore what we know. Sooner or later there will be another flood that illustrates how we understand where the hurricane will go but not why the mountain soil lost its ability to withstand forces it has seen regularly for thousands of years.
The hypothesis: Mycorhizzia fungi create glomalin as a structural component for the foraging hyphae. As the mycelial mat dies back this material is left behind, where it binds soil particles into clumps, making pore space in the soil for water, air and roots. Associated with a large percentage of plants, mycorhizzia associated with trees condition the soil with these deposits, creating water storage on a landscape scale to the depth of the roots and fungi, the biological or surface water zone, and slowing its course through the soils extending the wet period in many areas, and defending against drought. This substance acts like a landscape glue. Its destruction sets in motion sedimentation and dissolution of steep hillsides, especially in wet weather. The surface glue can be grown back in several years but deeper deposits starve if all their sources of nutrition suddenly are removed. This can cause land failures years and decades after the trees have been harvested even if grass and shrubs have been established, since the roots rarely get deep enough or widespread enough to replace the aging glomalin. Managing for glomalin protects water resources and makes tree cutting simply a means of reducing excess capacity in a very productive enterprise.
Science Daily (www.sciencedaily.com) has had several articles from the Duke University Free Air Carbon Exchange (FACE) experiments, usually with some finding like trees won’t reduce global warming or something. We also have linked to research from Wisconsin on these FACE experiments, but they are all in one place at www.CO2Science.org magazine. Once again I wish they include glomalin production with the increased CO2 measurements but I suppose that will be later in the century. These FACE experiments could quantify carbon sequestration, and used in conjunction with soil moisture readings really give some insight into how vegetation modifies its landscape and interacts with the climate.
New Scientist also reported most scientific reports turn out to be wrong. But that is how science works. You propose a hypothesis based on observation. You acquire as much as knowledge as you can and ask others to try it out and debate it. If it seems to answer the hypothesis, it is accepted until newer knowledge tells us we must go back and recalculate. The idea may be commercialized or ignored at any point, so that money is often more important than observed facts, and the research challenged because it threatens economic interests. But we ignore natural law at our own peril.