Forestry notes
ECOSYSTEM-BASED FOREST MANAGEMENT
- Goal: to harvest resources while minimizing effects on the rest of the ecosystem
- Ecologically sensitive areas are carefully monitored and protected; resources are harvested selectively
- Ecosystems are complex, so choosing which area to protect and which to harvest is a challenge
- Old growth or Primary forest
- 36% of worlds forests
- Second-growth forest
- 60% of worlds forests
- Tree plantation, tree farm or commercial forest
- 4% of worlds forests
- May supply most of the industrial wood in the future
- 4% of worlds forests
- Ecological value:
- provide habitat for organism
- Source of biodiversity
- Prevent erosion
- Purify water
- Store carbon, release oxygen
- Economic value:
- Timber for lumber and fuel
- Source of food
- Raw material for many medicines
- Three methods: clear-cutting seed-tree or shelter wood approach, and selection system
- May result in even-aged or uneven-aged regrowth
- Even-aged regrowth tends to be less bio diverse than uneven-aged regrowth
- Involves cutting down all trees in a region, resulting in even-aged stands of regrowth
- Changes abiotic conditions in the area, including light penetration, precipitation, wind, and temperature
- Benefit: Cost efficient
- Costs: Entire communities usually displaced or destroyed; causes soil erosion
- Seed tree: small numbers of mature, healthy trees are left standing, to reseed the area
- Shelter wood: involves leaving a few matures trees standing to provide shelter for seedings
- Benefit: less damaging than clear-cutting
- Cost: As with clear cutting, leads to mostly even-aged regrowth
- Relatively few tree are cut at once under a selection system
- Selection can involve widely spaced single trees or groups
- Benefits:
- more bio diverse, uneven-aged growth
- less overall environmental damage
- Costs:
- Machinery disturbs forest interior
- Expensive process
- More dangerous for loggers
UNSUSTAINABLE LOGGING IS A MAJOR THREAT TO FOREST ECOSYSTEMS
NATIONAL FOREST MANAGEMENT
- increased erosion
- sediment runoff into waterways
- habitat fragmentation
- loss of diversity
- Unlike timber harvesting, deforestation replaces forested areas with some other land use, such as commercial or residential property
- Deforestation in tropical and arid regions has the most negative effects due to loss of biodiversity and desertification risk respectively
- Globally, deforestation adds CO2 to Earths atmosphere
- Timber from old growth tropical rain forests is a source of income in developing nations
- Advanced technology enables deforestation to occur far faster than it has in he US
- Deforestation of tropical rain forests has an enormously negative effect on global species diversity
NATIONAL FOREST MANAGEMENT
- requires that renewable resource management plans to be made for each national forest
- Plans are required to be consistent with the principles of multiple use and maximum sustainable yield
- Logging has declined in national forests since passage of the Act, but policies are vulnerable to political influence
- Most logging in the U.S. takes place on privately owned tree plantations
- A tree plantation is typically an even-aged mono culture with little habitat variety or biodiversity
- Use of plantations for timber protects National Forests form being logged
- Surface fires
- usually burn leaf litter and undergrowth
- may provide food in the form of vegetation that sprouts after fire
- Crown fires
- extremely hot; burns whole trees
- Kill wildfire
- Increase soil erosion
I SPEAK FOR THE TREES
Compare the Once-ler’s attitude toward the environment at the beginning of the story with his attitude at the end.
- The Once-ler's attitude at the beginning of the story was that he was doing no harm chopping one tree down. Then after he sold one he got greedy and called in his whole family. Then he got more and more people and his profits were going through the roof. All he wanted was money and was worrying about the environment. After the last tree was cut down everyone left and all that was left was the big empty factory and the nasty environment.
- When the Lorax says he speaks for the tree he means that he has to speaking for the trees because they have no tongues to speak for themselves. What this means to mean is that The Lorax was accusing the Once-ler for ruining the environment when he was making his factory bigger and bigger. The Lorax's attitude at the end of the story was sad and gave the Once-ler a glare and he took the seat of his pants and left and all he left behind was a stone that said Unless. This was saying that only things can change if someone is willing to make that change.
- Once the Once-ler heard what the Lorax was saying he decided to only cut down a few trees a year. So that the trees would have time to grow back. Also, he was not allowed to cut down immature trees because he needed to let them grow till they matured. The factories had to much polluting so the Lorax told him to cut back and find another way, instead of throwing away the pollutants and putting them in the rivers where the fish swim. The air needed to stay clean. The Once-ler had to figure out how to keep the biodiversity and the ecosystem clean at the same time.