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| 6/2/2009 10:36:00 AM | Email this article • Print this article
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Photos by DAMIAN MULINIX/Observer photojournalist
Sitting among a stand of old and new-growth cedars, hemlock and firs, Ellsworth Creek program director Tom Kollasch takes in the quiet beauty of what he calls one of his favorite spots in the forest. |
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Photos by DAMIAN MULINIX/Chinook Observer
CUT HERE, BUT NOT HERE: Markers guide the boundary of where thinning will be taking place. In this case, the bowl of land below will have thinning done in the future. |
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Life amongst the tall trees
Ellsworth Creek restoration is a model for a new era of forest management
By CATE GABLE
Observer correspondent
NASELLE - We may be standing amid a grove of 1,200-year-old cedars but the ideas being tested here are brand new.
Tom Kollasch, program director; Bill Lecture, Willapa forester; and ecologist Liane Davis are part of a team collaborating on restoring and preserving the 4,500-acre Ellsworth Creek watershed recently purchased by The Nature Conservancy (TNC).
Two enormous cedars dubbed the "Gate Keepers" tower over the trail, which takes us down through duff and over huge snaky roots to a quiet spot deep within this strip of old growth.
Two pileated woodpeckers make a quick dash through the treetops. Giant black ants and shiny beetles scurry along the forest floor, over our boots and up our pant legs. Wind tips the crowns of the 100-year-old hemlocks high above our heads.
Kollasch, a birder, listens intently and names a few of the songs he hears in the canopy - varied thrush, Vaux's swift, Pacific slope flycatcher.
Then he explains how this land came under Conservancy stewardship. "With all the external threats in place to a watershed, the Conservancy decided to start working at scale."
"Instead of purchasing small parcels, we figured if we could buy a whole watershed, we'd have a chance to test how best to restore older commercial forest land back to its natural conditions."
A project for several lifetimesThe Nature Conservancy met their goal by purchasing - from a patchwork of landowners - 4,500 contiguous acres, of which all but 300 acres had been logged over the past 100 years. Now the goal is to test forest restoration and selective harvesting techniques on this land in order to create a model for other regions.
The Ellsworth Creek watershed stretches from the Naselle River over Bear Ridge, south to the Greenhead Slough along the Bear River, and east to Pellerbo Ridge. It includes 25-year-old Douglas fir, several groves of old growth cedar, 100-year-old hemlocks, mixed forests, and the estuary where the mouth of the creek joins the Naselle River just southeast of the bridge.
To illustrate the differing terrains in the watershed, Lecture points out a slope with cedar stumps 15-feet across. Timber operations in the 1960s created this patch where fir and hemlock were left to reseed themselves naturally. Several cedar "nurse logs" were dropped and left in place.
In another area, the commercial logging techniques of the last several decades are in view. Methods shifted to more dramatic clear-cutting of all trees and burning of the understory. This land was replanted with a mono-crop of Douglas fir, the most commercially valuable, averaging a density of 600 trees per acre.
"I can envision what these forests can become but what we're doing here won't come to fruition in my lifetime. I won't see it with my own eyes," says Lecture, who moved to Seaview after retiring from 32 years with the Oregon Department of Forestry where he was operations manager for the Clatsop State Forest.
"This is my legacy," he says. "I came out of retirement to work on this project - it was too good to pass up."
The range of trees that make up our coastal forests have differing requirements for growth and different lifecycles. Spruce like wet roots but need sun to get a foothold. They can age 400 to 800 years.
Cedars are the granddaddies of the coastal forests. They grow to be up to 1,200 years old and typically have candelabra splits at their crowns, which support unique canopy ecosystems. In the old growth grove where we stand, one elbow crook several hundred feet above our heads is sprouting with huckleberries, salal, even a small hemlock.
"They've found earthworms up in canopy soil," Kollasch says.
What is 'old growth'?These old growth forests tend to have mistletoe that leaves hemlock branches swollen and stubby. This is not something a commercial forester wants to see, but it is a perfect nesting platform for marbled murrelets. Hemlocks top out around 200 years old and have the unique quality of waiting patiently in the undergrowth to get a pocket of sun for a growth spurt.
Alders grow quickly - an old alder might be 60-80 years of age - while Douglas firs typically grow to be 600 to 800 years old and can live as long as 1,200 years.
"When you say 'old growth,' it depends on the kind of tree and the forest type you're talking about," says Lecture. "What we're trying to do here is create a naturally diverse forest and help these trees live to their potential."
After a commercial clear cut, when trees of the same age, size and type are planted, they become susceptible to disease and blowdowns like the December 2007 typhoon.
This is not the way nature works. Nature hedges her bets with a diverse forest of all types and ages of trees. So one of the keys to reestablishing an old growth stand is thinning.
TNC developed a forest management plan that specifies young forests of about 20 to 25 years of age will be thinned from 2,500 to 220 trees per acre. At intervals of roughly 20 years they will be thinned again to bring them more in line with old-growth forests, which have perhaps 75 to 80 trees of varying species and ages on each acre of ground.
Coastal forest shaped by windLecture points out an area where a crew has created a thinning pattern called "drop and leave." Smaller trees have been cut and left on the ground to compost naturally.
"We want the trees that are left to be 'wind-firm,'" says Davis, "This thinning gives them more resources - light and nutrients - so they can grow bigger, deeper crowns and be healthier trees."
"But you can miss your window for thinning," she continues. "An older stand can't recover and change its structure the way a younger stand can. Thinning is one of the management tools we're using. We've got eight sections where we're testing different techniques, and we'll be measuring our success against a control area."
Kollasch adds, "In the Cascades, in the eastern part of the state, fire is one of the major developmental drivers in the forest. Here on the coast, it's the wind. Wind helps a stand develop its winners and losers."
To illustrate, Lecture gestures to another area where several large cedars came down after the '07 storms. This newly opened sun pocket already has hemlocks vying for light and space as well as new cedars pushing up from the nurse logs rotting slowly in place. The processes of a natural forest are beginning to reassert themselves.
Time to re-work forest roadsAnother management tool is the re-aligning and decommissioning of roads.
A road graded into the side of a hill cuts into the natural contour of the land and broadcasts a spill of dirt and rock called "sidecast." This road can then become an unintended thruway for water that disrupts the natural hydrology and can produce dangerous slides and flooding.
If a road crosses a stream without a culvert in place, the material pushed into the streambed to create the crossing effectively cuts off both adult salmon migration upstream and juvenile migration downstream.
Bonneville Power Administration (BPA) has a power corridor that runs through the watershed and, as many of our residents well know, creating reliable vehicle access to a main powerline is critical in an emergency.
"We've worked with Bonneville to upgrade the roads and put them on ridge tops to eliminate the sidecast. By joining existing access routes, we've been able to decommission about 12 miles of roadway within the watershed and, at the same time, improve road quality," says Kollasch.
Foresters were brought in from California to teach the Conservancy crews how to decommission a road. It involves bringing the sidecast back into place to restore the natural contour and hydrology of the land, re-texturing the compacted gravel roadbed, and laying down thinned forest materials as a last step.
Eventually the roadbeds will reseed with new growth and disappear back into the landscape.
Selective logging in a conservation zoneAll of these management activities take money - purchasing the land is only the first step. This is where selective logging, the last piece of the management plan, comes into play.
Ian Hanna, of the Northwest Natural Resources Group, led the effort to certify the Ellsworth logging program. From his office in Port Townsend, Hanna gives some insight into how this process works and touches on how forestry practices are changing.
"The timber wars of the '80s were intense. But we're coming to a point where the conversation is getting less polarized. There may still be some discussion, but the scientific and anecdotal evidence is overwhelming - if you're starting with industrially managed land, it's possible to thin your way back to old growth with the proper techniques. That's what they're doing at Ellsworth."
He goes on, "The Forest Stewardship Council advocates a balanced approach - removing logs and making money from it - because the process can pay for itself."
The Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) is an independent non-profit established to promote sustainable management of the world's forests. Individuals or organizations who register with the organization can sell FSC-certified wood to mills which ultimately make their way to consumers. The Ellsworth project has been FSC-certified, and Hanna mentions a couple other local residents who have taken advantage of the certification process.
"My dad's place is coming into membership - Larry Hanna - he's got three acres. And one of our board members, Alan Liebovitz, who lives in South Bend, manages FSC-certified land."
There are 270 million FSC-certified acres globally, and 30 million acres in the U.S. - of those, 320,000 acres are in Washington. Twenty six million board feet of FSC-certified wood is sold in the South Puget Sound region each year.
In FSC-sponsored multi-stakeholder conversations - including landowners, commercial timber companies, Native tribes, and local residents - sustainable harvest standards tailored to unique eco-regions around the globe are developed. The U.S. has nine regional standards.
Hanna explains, "FSC does not allow the liquidation of old growth. It does allow selective harvesting provided it doesn't diminish the habitat involved and there is absolutely no clear cutting or intensive harvesting."
"Good forestry is a way to give people jobs and heal the landscape. Even the commercial timber industry is beginning to realize that more diversified markets is good for business."
Ending the 'race to the bottom'
Over the last 15 years, much of the infrastructure for the timber industry has been dismantled. "We've lost more than half of our sawmills," Hanna continues. "The ones that are left are softwood mills and are targeting a much smaller log. People who want to grow diverse forests with larger timber have fewer and fewer options."
"As you lose environmental resiliency in the timber industry - down to a couple of species of very small logs - it's a race to the bottom for wood products. That's not good for anyone. The challenge is how to put a higher value on the older, larger log," says Hanna.
FSC is connecting sustainable forest management to the marketplace by developing a structure that monetizes the development of habitat and eco-system services, creating new market niches for timber with higher value.
Lecture comments on the current timber market, "Right now the market values are low because of the collapse in housing starts. Hemlock is $200 per 1,000 board feet. Last fall it was up around $380 per 1,000 board feet."
Douglas fir - which because of its strength and growth rate is the workhorse for the logging industry - is selling at around $250 per 1,000 board feet as opposed to $425 per 1,000 board feet last year.
"I've seen these boom and bust cycles before," says Lecture. "On the Ellsworth project, we've worked out the figures and we need to wait until the market hits around $380 per 1,000 board feet in order to cover our costs and add the funds we need for the thinning and road work."
Lecture adds, "None of the timber companies are logging right now. It would be foolish."
FSC-certified lumber costs more because a portion of the price supports sustainable forest management. It is all part of the effort to change the economic value structure that has been in place during the industrial era of forest management in the Pacific Northwest. That is, the outdated concept that a tree is more valuable at the mill than in the ground.
Lecture, Hanna, Kollasch, Davis and others are proposing a new model that balances the equation by allowing old growth trees to stay in the ground to provide habitat, clean water, flood control and other eco-services. At the same time, selective harvesting, along with thinning and reconfigured roads, can provide employment and wood products for all of us.
As Bill Lecture says about the Ellsworth Creek project, "We want to lead by example, so that the conservation ethic flows from right here in the forest to the mills to Home Depot into your backyard."
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