Combo of fire, logging seems to work best
Sacramento Bee
August 3, 2003
There is a valuable lesson to be learned about forestry based on a fire that happened to burn last fall through a small "experimental forest" in the Sierra. Unfortunately, it is unclear whether anyone -- either environmentalists or Bush administration officials -- will learn from it.
This is a story about the understory, the foresters' term for that thicket of brush and small trees under the tall trees, and how managing it with a combination of logging and prescribed burns will result in a fireproof forest.
Much of the Sierra is dominated by an artificially dense understory. It's artificial because for years, loggers took out the bigger trees and firefighters put out blazes that could have cleared the unprofitable materials that loggers left behind. An exception in the Sierra is the Blacks Mountain Experimental Forest , a 10,000-acre living laboratory. There in the Lassen National Forest , researchers have been studying wildlife in 250-acre plots. These plots have been managed differently, and intentionally so. Some have been intensively logged, others burned, others treated with a combination of both.
An unexpected experiment took place last September when a fire entered the forest. The Cone Fire ended up behaving quite differently in these plots. It burned hotter in spots treated by just logging, or just prescribed burns, than in parcels managed with both logging and burns. The key to the logging, as a UC researcher noted, wasn't in removing big trees. It was in removing the understory, a job done most effectively with teamwork between loggers and experts in prescribed fire.
The Bush administration has been drifting away from prescribed fire as a management tool in the Sierra (too expensive, too cumbersome with air regulations) and leaning toward a logging-dominated approach to forestry. The environmental movement prefers more prescribed fires and less logging. A political compromise -- using both, together, in the right places -- looks like sound science as well. Imagine that.