Logging on Public Lands
To read about the economic case against logging on public lands, click here.
Kentucky Heartwood supports responsible logging on private land. Great examples include Rough Creek Farm near Elizabethtown and Pioneer Forest in Missouri. If you're interested in getting a myriad of values from your forest while keeping it a forest, we recommend checking these folks out.
With regards to public land, Kentucky Heartwood is steadfastly opposed to the Forest Service's commercial logging program. Over the past 30 years the Forest Service has cut significant amounts of the Daniel Boone, leaving a legacy of thicket-like clearcuts and young forests where maturing second-growth forests were just beginning to take hold after a century of recovery. The bureaucratic, economic, and cultural structures of the Forest Service have promoted a system that overemphasizes young forests and early successional habitat and devalues or ignores the importance of late successional and old growth forests as well as the impacts of forest fragmentation.
The forests of our region in their natural state are primarily uneven-aged and are driven primarily by a process called "gap phase dynamics." Gap dynamics occurs as individual or small groups of trees die from wind-throw, ice damage, insects, old age, or other phenomena leaving openings in the canopy. Trees in the understory rapidly take advantage of the new light conditions and compete to take dominance in the newly created space. What species succeed in the new gap depends largely upon what species are present before the gap-making event and the size and orientation of the gap. The end result is an uneven aged forest with a great deal of structural diversity. In opposition to this natural process, the Forest Service emphasizes "even aged management" where all of the overstory trees are removed either all at once or over the course of two successive cuts. The result is a densely stocked forest of trees of the same age, frequently suffering from issues of resource competition and a lack of structural diversity.
Dead trees, particularly of larger sizes, are also very important in ecosystem functioning. In addition to playing important roles in nutrient cycling in the forest, rotting logs (called "coarse woody debris" or "course woody material" in the scientific literature) and snags (standing dead trees) offer important habitat to innumerable species of insects, herpetofauna (like salamanders), fungi, birds, and mammals. Many species require or prefer dead wood of large diameters not seen until forests are allowed at least 150 or more years to recover. Unfortunately, the Forest Service typically works to make sure that little of the forested landscape gets this old, and economic pressures on private forestlands make conservation of these attributes on any meaningful scale difficult.
Active management can be part of legitimate ecological restoration of our forests. However, logging that the Forest Service frequently proposes for "forest health" is often little more than commercial logging that targets the best timber and recreates the very conditions they say they need to manage to alleviate.
To learn more about Kentucky Heartwood's concerns with management on the Daniel Boone National Forest we recommend that you read our comments on various Forest Service proposals that we have posted to our News Blog. You can easily find them by searching "comments" in the tags.
To learn more about old growth in our region, we highly recommend reading Eastern Old Growth, edited by Mary Byrd Davis. You can read portions of the book here.
You can also read more about the ecology of eastern forests here.
Kentucky Heartwood supports responsible logging on private land. Great examples include Rough Creek Farm near Elizabethtown and Pioneer Forest in Missouri. If you're interested in getting a myriad of values from your forest while keeping it a forest, we recommend checking these folks out.
With regards to public land, Kentucky Heartwood is steadfastly opposed to the Forest Service's commercial logging program. Over the past 30 years the Forest Service has cut significant amounts of the Daniel Boone, leaving a legacy of thicket-like clearcuts and young forests where maturing second-growth forests were just beginning to take hold after a century of recovery. The bureaucratic, economic, and cultural structures of the Forest Service have promoted a system that overemphasizes young forests and early successional habitat and devalues or ignores the importance of late successional and old growth forests as well as the impacts of forest fragmentation.
The forests of our region in their natural state are primarily uneven-aged and are driven primarily by a process called "gap phase dynamics." Gap dynamics occurs as individual or small groups of trees die from wind-throw, ice damage, insects, old age, or other phenomena leaving openings in the canopy. Trees in the understory rapidly take advantage of the new light conditions and compete to take dominance in the newly created space. What species succeed in the new gap depends largely upon what species are present before the gap-making event and the size and orientation of the gap. The end result is an uneven aged forest with a great deal of structural diversity. In opposition to this natural process, the Forest Service emphasizes "even aged management" where all of the overstory trees are removed either all at once or over the course of two successive cuts. The result is a densely stocked forest of trees of the same age, frequently suffering from issues of resource competition and a lack of structural diversity.
Dead trees, particularly of larger sizes, are also very important in ecosystem functioning. In addition to playing important roles in nutrient cycling in the forest, rotting logs (called "coarse woody debris" or "course woody material" in the scientific literature) and snags (standing dead trees) offer important habitat to innumerable species of insects, herpetofauna (like salamanders), fungi, birds, and mammals. Many species require or prefer dead wood of large diameters not seen until forests are allowed at least 150 or more years to recover. Unfortunately, the Forest Service typically works to make sure that little of the forested landscape gets this old, and economic pressures on private forestlands make conservation of these attributes on any meaningful scale difficult.
Active management can be part of legitimate ecological restoration of our forests. However, logging that the Forest Service frequently proposes for "forest health" is often little more than commercial logging that targets the best timber and recreates the very conditions they say they need to manage to alleviate.
To learn more about Kentucky Heartwood's concerns with management on the Daniel Boone National Forest we recommend that you read our comments on various Forest Service proposals that we have posted to our News Blog. You can easily find them by searching "comments" in the tags.
To learn more about old growth in our region, we highly recommend reading Eastern Old Growth, edited by Mary Byrd Davis. You can read portions of the book here.
You can also read more about the ecology of eastern forests here.
