After a large fire, land managers face controversial choices: let the forest regenerate on its own or harvest scorched trees and replant.
The practice of salvage logging and replanting removes deadwood that might fuel the next fire. But new research shows salvage logging is not an automatic choice.
As firefighters stamp out the dwindling Angora fire near South Lake Tahoe, experts say it's too soon to determine long-term management strategies for the region. But the fire has brought home to area forest groups the difficulty in selecting the right post-fire strategy for a forest.
Large-scale salvage logging after Angora is unlikely due to environmental protections and the small logging industry presence in the Lake Tahoe basin, according to regional planning officials. Nonetheless, trees that pose a risk to people and property on public lands burned in the Angora blaze will be removed.
Foresters also are encouraging private landowners in Tahoe to remove fire-killed timber.
"If you don't remove the dead material now, and you get a new flush of vegetation, the new vegetation plus the dead trees is just another prescription for disaster," said Tim Feller, Tahoe district manager for Sierra Pacific Industries, a Redding-based wood products company. Sierra Pacific owns no private land in the Lake Tahoe basin.
But the common salvage logging remedy is under new scrutiny.
A study conducted in southwest Oregon showed fires were most severe in areas that were salvage-logged and replanted. Also, areas that burned severely in the first fire were more likely to burn 15 years later, researchers at Oregon State University and the Pacific Northwest Research Station of the U.S. Forest Service found.
Findings were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on June 19.
Given differences in forest types between the study area and California's Sierra, the Oregon study's findings may not directly apply to the Angora fire, said Thomas Spies, author on the study and research forester with the U.S. Forest Service.
"To get a better understanding of the management implications, we need better information about what differences in severity might mean on the ground," Spies said.
The study touched off a debate among professional forest managers.
The study does not properly address funding constraints that limit the Forest Service's ability to monitor salvage-logged and replanted areas to clear brush and fallen branches, said Tom Bonnicksen, emeritus professor of forest science at Texas A&M and visiting scholar with the Forest Foundation, a logging industry group. Those conditions can increase fire hazards in salvage-logged forests, he said.
Ara Marderosian sees the study differently: "I've seen no science that would indicate that salvage logging is an appropriate tool to implement in a national forest."
The heavy machinery required for salvage logging disturbs habitat required for some wildlife, explained Marderosian, executive director of Sequoia Forestkeeper, an environmental group based in Kernville.
Salvage logging disrupts soil, damages natural seedlings and removes shade needed for young seedlings to grow, he added.Sacramento Bee
