Road infrastructure

When I was studying forestry they really drilled into us the importance of good road infrastructure for forest management. Working in Maine I was able to see some good examples, but it is especially stark here in the Carpathians. I learned early on at the lishosp that practically no new forest roads have been built on this territory since the fall of the Soviet Union. But this does not mean that large areas of the lishosp have been inaccessible. On the contrary, they've reached almost every place that's not too steep to cut. They do this be using mountain streams as logging roads. I found this pretty shocking when I first saw it, but have learned that it is very common in the Carpathians, and makes forest management possible in a lot of unroaded areas.

It has some pretty clear ecological consequences, though. At the least, the weight of the skidders and log trucks distorts the streambed, often destroying the natural stream structure and creating two channels (in the tiretracks). Much worse than this, a series of skid roads run straight into the stream. In these steep conditions these skid roads often turn into mini-muslides. The skidders and trucks rip up the streamside vegetation, allowing for even more soil movement into the stream. In the most extreme example I have seen, a steep slope above a small stream was clearcut directly to the stream bank. The logs were then rolled down the slope, and picked up by a log truck parked in the stream. This only 100 yards from the site of a recent mudslide. 

I have talked with some foresters here about this, but it is a very touchy subject. If the use of these small streams for logging was prohibited, it would put most of their territory off limits to exploitation. I have come to see this as the most negative aspect of forest management here, in unfortunate contrast the many good aspects such as the system of protected areas. In fact, there is even an excellent network of riparian protective zones within the lishosp. But these are focused on the main river (Prut) and its largest tributaries. Small streams (potoki) are unprotected and treated more like transportation routes than natural water bodies. As a result, plumes of mud flow into the Prut from these streams whenever there is an ongoing logging operation. It is important to note that forestry is not alone in this problem - there appear to be few limits on streamside construction, and I often see big areas of floodplain stripped of vegetation to build new hotels. The ski resort Bukovel (Ukraine's biggest, within the lishosp where I work) is the biggest offender. Thanks to a huge amount of new construction there, the Prutets River (the Prut's biggest tributary) runs brown almost constantly. 

Some money is beginning to trickle into Carpathian lishospi to build new roads. I worked a few days with Volodymyr Korzhov, a forest roads specialists from the Institute of Mountain Forestry in Ivano-Frankivsk. He travels around the Oblast helping lishospi design new mountain roads to "Austrian" standards. As he told me, the quality of the road on the ground is often much worse than what he designed on the map. But at least these roads are not located in a stream! He took me to Osmolodske Lishosp, deep in the Gorgany Mountains on the Ivano-Frankivsk/Zakarpattye border. There we saw a beautiful new "Austrian" road that is being built into the Gorgany. I admired the quality, but also had to wonder what the new accessibility this road brings will mean to remote forests of the Gorgany... I think this territory would be a great place to do high conservation value forest delineation, before the logging starts. 

My first field study: Vorokhta Forest Management Unit

For the months of September and October I have been living in the Ukrainian Carpathians, doing a field study for my project in the Vorokhta region. I am working at the local forest management unit (Lishosp), which is publicly owned and managed by the State Committee of Forest Management. I am using this lishosp as a test case for how the new Ukrainian High Conservation Value Forest (HCVF) standards could be applied in managed forests in the Carpathians. 

I have used FSC certification to frame this question, because the forestry administration in this province (Ivano-Frankivsk) has expressed interest in certifying all its lishospi. But FSC is basically unknown among field foresters here, and so my topic is met with a lot of suspicion! I think foresters fear that HCVF identification will remove even more of their acreage from the "exploitation fund" and place it in the "protective fund". There is probably some truth in this, but I believe that their existing network of protective forests (on steep slopes, around rivers, where rare forest types are found) already includes most of the HCVF in the territory. 41% of this lishosp is in the protective forest category. Clearcutting is forbidden in protective forests, and some are entirely off limits to forest management. 

I am really interested in the network of small protected areas that were established in Soviet times throughout managed forests. In the area I am working, there are several "monuments of nature", including relict populations of Pinus cembra, cliff forests dominated by Pinus sylvestris, and very high productivity beech forests.  I think the Soviet botanists and foresters who identified and protected these areas made a major contribution to biodiversity conservation. These areas usually go at the top of the list for HCVF in any given area. 

The pictures above are from "monuments of nature" and other protective forests inside Vorokhtyanske Lishosp. The gnarly looking pine is Pinus cembra, or Swiss stone pine. It is only found in small relictual stands in the Carpathians.

Hello from Ukraine! I have now been here for more than two months, but have only recently established any kind of reliable internet connection. So I've got a pretty big backlog of experiences to right about! I'm living in the Carpathians now, but my first Ukrainian post will be about a short trip I took to Polissie Zapovednik (Nature Reserve) in northern Ukraine.

My advisor Sergiy Zibtsev took me to meet the reserve because he is working on fire management issues there. The forests of the Polissie ("in the woods") region cover a big swathe of Ukraine, Belarus, Russia and Poland. It is a mixture of dry outwash sites and extensive swamps, with scots pine being the dominant species in both types. Silver birch is also quite common, and there is some Populus tremula. Quercus robur is present too, but site quality is so low in the Reserve that it only grows as a small midstory tree. The reserve was established to protect a complex of unique bog ecosystems, and the forests within it are generally very dry and unproductive pine sites. Picture widely spaced, slow-growing scots pine with a few scattered midstory oaks and a ground cover of blueberry. Also lots of scots pine plantations.

In 2007 there was a big fire here (550 hectares). Mortality in young stands and plantations was very high, while older pines in natural stands withstood the fire with minimal damage. The director of the reserve wants to start using prescribed fire to reduce fuel loading. His imperative is to protect peatland communities, which can be very badly damaged by creeping peat fires. He also wants to initiate prescribed burning in the neighboring forest management units and collective farms. Such coordination is not easy in Ukraine, and he is already working against very strong anti-fire feeling in the forestry establishment. 

Probably the most interesting aspect of the trip was the official response to the fires. They were regarded only as a disaster, even though fire is actually quite natural in Polissie and older pine forests are well adapted to it. Zapovedniks are strict nature reserves, but here we saw extensive salvaging of burnt stands, even ones that will easily survive the fire. Fire could actually help restore natural structural features here, but burnt stands are clearcut and replanted. We saw some areas that had very high fire mortality, which was followed by excellent natural regeneration of pine. But because the foresters must demonstrate that they did something in response to the fire, it is possible that some of this regen will be plowed under and nursery seedlings planted there instead! It is very important to show that burnt acres have been actively "reforested"...

Dr. Zibtsev is trying to convince the reserve managers to at least leave healthy residuals and fire snags during the salvage process, to help maintain some complex features in the next stand. He is also trying to identify stands that will survive the fires well and do not need to be salvaged. 

Red pine in mixed stands?

Last week I went downeast with Kyle Burdick to do the Fourth Machias Lake-Gasabias Lake- Nicatous Lake route. We never found the Gasabias Portage, which was a pain, but we saw some beautiful pine forests on Fourth Machias and Nicatous. White and red pine play a more dominant role here than northern Maine; if you never leave the lakes you might think pine was all that grew here. I think this goes hand in hand with the greater place of fire downeast than anywhere up north. Unfortunately, Hancock and Washington Counties are not included in the early survey records, so it is hard to demonstrate fire's historic place here. (But if anyone could ever find the surveys from Bingham's Penobscot Purchase, that would be a goldmine. For that matter, the surveys from his Kennebec Purchase would tell us a lot about pre-settlement forests in western Maine.)

Most of the red pine on the lakes is in fairly pure, even-aged clumps, as you'd expect from fire origin. But there are a fair number of mixed pine-hemlock-spruce stands, where red pine is sprinkled fairly thinly throughout. They don't look like older residuals, I think they are in the same cohort(s) as the spruce and hemlock. So how did these stands develop? Either they are fire-generated (unlikely, I think) or red pine is adapted to typical Acadian forest gap dynamics. It would be very interesting to take a closer look at red pine in mixed stands, and understand its potential recruitment pathways better. I suspect that on pine-friendly outwash sites (i.e. near Nicatous), red pine can regenerate after small partial disturbances. The picture shows some nice red pine seedlings coming up in a light (trails-only) cut near the lake. 

Structural Complexity Enhancement

I was in Vermont for two days visiting Bill Keeton and Yurij Bihun to discuss my Fulbright project, and had the chance to visit Bill's Structural Complexity Enhancement (SCE) plots in the Mt. Mansfield State Forest. Bill developed this harvest method as a means of speeding the development of late-successional features in maturing stands. It uses variable density thinning to make small gaps, release midstory trees, and open up the crowns of canopy dominants, all while retaining the largest stems. Snags and CWD are deliberately 

created, and in some treatments trees are even pushed over to simulate windthow.

In adjacent plots there are traditional single-tree and group selection treatments, but with the residual

 basal area increased from normal and the max. diameter increased to 24 inches. This is meant to demonstrate how simply tweaking traditional harvest systems might enhance structural complexity, in comparison to the SCE method. 

I have to say, even the traditional treatments have some pretty impressive "big structure" (see right), but the vertical and horizontal diversity is noticeably lower. The SCE treatment is a jumble of small gaps, poletimber, snags and big canopy trees, arranged with none of the order and uniformity of selection. This is the point, and it is impressively "complex". Happily, Bill has found that sugar maple will regenerate in the tiny gaps created (and yellow birch will on the artificial tip-up mounds). Also, SCE actually benefits populations of late-successional herbs (they don't get overwhelmed by ruderals) and has boosted red-backed salamander populations due to more CWD. 

It is nice to see a couple of concrete biodiversity benefits from SCE. I have certainly seen how important old, complex stands can be for rare lichens. But the number of species that are actually dependent on such stands seems pretty low. For SCE and similar treatments to catch on, I think we would have to see how structural complexity benefits non-obligate species. Does it allow a greater breadth of successional guilds to use a stand at the same time? Could we effectively "pack in" more habitat value per stand by creating more structural diversity and more niches? 

Microburst, July 2006

In July 2006, we had an amazing microburst 

windstorm come through our region. I don't know its exact trajectory, but I think it blew SW-NE, hitting Somerville,

 Palermo and Liberty especially hard. I heard that some southern Kennebec County towns also got hit, and there is impressive windthrow from about the same time on some islands in Casco Bay. 

When this storm occurred we had not had a serious large-scale disturbance in Somerville since the Ice Storm of 1998. The microburst created gaps in the canopy from single-tree size to 5+ acres. The arrangement of snags, downed logs and residual trees after the event was fascinating: a textbook example of how natural disturbance impacts stand development. Certain species were hit harder than others. Tall, emergent white pines were "combed out" of mixed forests. Pure, old-field pine stands (including some that I helped my friend Shaun to thin immaculately) were totalled, often through snapping.  On mixed hardwood-hemlock ridges, aspen tended to be the hardest hit, while red oak and red maple were thrown selectively. A lot of hardwoods sustained heavy crown damage but didn't fall. I have read that yellow birch and red maple are adapted to slough off large branches in wind storms to reduce their crown "sail".

Where winds were strong enough, the storm did amazing damage to pure stands of oak sawtimber, which I had thought of as a wind-resistant species. 

Hemlock was pretty susceptible, especially if it was already decadent. In Casco Bay (Whaleboat Island) the storms knocked down swathes of red spruce about 200 feet wide, while leaving adjacent areas untouched. But even within areas of susceptible species like spruce, there were still lots of "canopy legacies"- snags, heavily-damaged trees and surprisingly intact survivors.

One thing that really fascinated me was how well this storm replicated, on a much smaller scale, what I have read about the Hurricane of 1938. Just as in 1937, in 2005 there was a large supply of dense old-field pine stands in stem exclusion. These were growing on abandoned farmland, on sites where such a structure and composition was probably unnatural. The storm knocked them down almost without exception. After the blowdown and resultant salvage, the advance regeneration of oak, maple and ash is dominating the site. I suspect that many of the mixed hardwood stands in Somerville had a similar origin.

Of course, salvage has really changed the development trajectory for these areas. In Somerville and Palermo, almost the entire affected are was salvaged. (Often quite well). Where there was a lot of wood on the ground, salvage tended to destroy most of the advance regeneration. I think that the best place to see how storm-affected stands develop without salvage will be Whaleboat Island, which is owned by TNC as a coastal reserve. 

Welcome to my blog!

Hello!

     I was recently going through my huge collection of pictures I have taken in the woods, and decided that I should really share these with fellow forestry wonks. I also wanted a place to talk about my work and the ideas in forestry that really interest me, and to hear what other people think. I won't be using this blog for general, non-forestry related things in my life. So if you're not looking for silvicultural ramblings and lots of pictures of trees, turn back now! 

     

If that kind of thing gets you going, than I hope you'll enjoy my future posts. Please respond frequently- I will put a lot of questions in here that I hope people will help answer. I'm going to start with some of my favorite pics and topics from the last couple years. In a couple months I should start posting on my exciting new work in Ukraine. 

     Enjoy!