Oregon Natural Forestry

Ro ads as considered here are woodland roads and provide access into the forest for a variety of reasons.  They may be the way you get to a cabin, for wildfire prevention, to facilitate commercial operations or just a way to get more quickly away from where you are to where you want to be.  As someone who has walked into the forest and then driven the same route it is amazing how fast you can get some place in a vehicle, especially when it involves going up hill. Roads being a more or less permanent feature on the land need to be thought about before their construction.  That thinking needs to comply with the legal requirement of the Forest Practices Act and a responsibility to the sound forest stewardship that provides social, environmental and economic benefits.  R is for roads is more of a mental placeholder than a guide. For that guide you want someone who has been there before and has experience with designing, construction (or the administration of constru...

Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and other technology has been transforming forestry and the other natural resource professions for quite awhile but not forever.  Entry into some of these systems can be expensive for the programs, maintenance of the database(s) and user training. QGIS is a GIS that is open sourced and actually free to download but the point is that for a long time these tools were not available.  At the Society of American Foresters national convention in Portland a group of consulting foresters shared their thoughts on technology, and they were not all the same. With a 60 person shop and support more technology was used.  In a one person office, there were computers, tables and calculators. What I got from the talk is that waiting to start management of a forest until you have all the tools isn't necessary. The important part is to learn about your forest or find someone to help you and then start. Q is for QGIS (and a lot of other technolog...

P is for planning.  When it comes to forests and people there needs to be a plan.   Because it takes a while for a forest to change you need to know where you are, where you want to get to and a plan of how to get there. At the most recent (October 2018) Tillamook High School Forestry Field Day I ran the compass and pacing event.  Students from various high schools participated and the ones who did the best, stopped, thought about what they were going to do and then did it.  The challenge in compass and pacing was that many of the course instructions were in different units of measurements, but once converted into a single a unit completing the course was pretty straightforward. A forest plan is not always so straightforward as there are many changing and dynamic forces at work. If you have not thought about your forest maybe now is the time to do so.  If you wanted to thin the trees it takes awhile to find a logger that has time to do the work.  If y...

Collaboratives, Quincy Library Group, Oregon Humanities’ Conversation Project, it is all about people and their forest conversations.  When Mariah Action came to Cannon Beach and Tillamook recently she described the topic as “When we are talking about a forest, it is a hard conversation. Yet, I would wager that it is an easier conversation when we are thinking about big bright green trees…. than when we are talking about trees burning, (in a forest fire).” My reading of Landscapes of Conflict, The Oregon Story, 1940-2000 by author William G. Robbins suggests that while forest operations were ongoing no one was listening to people’s concerns or understanding how fast a forest grows. Following the conversation my takeaway was nothing short of our current political deadlock (United States) that minds are made up and are being reinforced by social media tweets and posts.  Strong in opinion and vitreal and lacking in words like understand and share. It does give me hope th...

What is natural?  In stream morphology (what they look like) there is a stage 1 to 4 and now a stage 0 which is supposed to be what the stream looked like before the any of the four stages.  In forests there is always dynamic changing. For instance following a major disturbance there is a re-establishment of trees, then a closing of the tree canopy to exclude light to the now forest floor.  Following that when the now “stand” of trees begins to change shape as some trees grow faster and some slower openings form allowing new trees to grow. Then, the now mixed age forest with bigger trees and smaller trees and dead trees (snags) and fallen trees (down logs) grows it changes by its growth and by other disturbances until there is another catastrophic disturbance beginning the cycle again. So is natural a time, physical shape, feeling or even a spiritual connection? Natural is a word with a lot of meanings, that mean different things to different people.  What it...

Mycorrhizal fungal associations are the amazing connections that trees roots find what nourish them.  Roots themselves, especially the fine roots are pretty good at getting what the tree needs to grow from the ground.  Mycorrhizae supercharges this connection by giving these fine roots even more surface area to absorb nutrients. Often mycorrhizae are in the ground just waiting for a tree, but not always.  Like any living organism they need a tree to co-exist with. Sometimes when trees have been gone for a long time the mycorrhizae go too.  In a recent article in The Guardian written by Damian Carrington “Magical Mushroom Mix to Boost Regrowth of Lost Scottish Forests”. From the article “The trees’ survival rate will then be compared with those planted without the fungi. While the use of mycorrhizae to boost plants is relatively new, it is known that young trees inoculated with the fungi suffer much less from the shock of planting.” When you look at trees, th...