Management efforts to promote forest resiliency as climate changes have often used historical forest structure and composition to provide general guidance for fuels reduction and forest restoration treatments.
Healthy trees are beneficial to our environment and our property values - but how do we determine if a tree is healthy? This publication briefly discusses common tree health problems and outlines a procedure for assessing tree conditions and getting diagnoses and recommendations from tree health professionals.
Aims Postfire logging recoups the economic value of timber killed by wildfire, but whether such forest management activity supports or impedes forest recovery in stands differing in structure from historic conditions remains unclear.
Many scientists and forest land managers concur that past fire suppression, grazing, and timber harvesting practices have created unnatural and unhealthy conditions in the dry, ponderosa pine forests of the western United States. Specifically, such forests are said to carry higher fuel loads and experience fires that are more severe than those that occurred historically.
This paper synthesizes available information on the effects of hazardous fuel reduction treatments on terrestrial wildlife and invertebrates in dry coniferous forest types in the West. We focused on thinning and/or prescribed fire studies in ponderosa pine (Pinus ponderosa) and dry-type Douglas-fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii ), lodgepole pine (Pinus contorta), and mixed coniferous forests.