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North Slope Criteria for Forest Restoration

NOTE: This is a draft version that is subject to revision.

background:

Many millions of acres of the Northern Rockies forests currently are severely overcrowded and at great risk of catastrophic, “stand–replacement” fires. This is due both to the fire suppression efforts of government agencies over the past hundred years and to past management practices such as “high–grade” logging. (Logging where the best and largest trees were cut for timber and the rest left.) Together, these past management practices and fire suppression efforts have resulted in the growth of overcrowded stands of small trees and accumulation of debris.

In the lower–elevation forests of the Northern Rockies, during pre–Settlement times, fires that were sparked by lightning or Native Americans periodically thinned out the forests, leaving open stands of large Ponderosa pine and, in some places, Western larch. But now without regular, low–intensity fires like these, dense stands of small Douglas fir crowd out the pine and larch. In clearcuts and “high–graded” areas, small Douglas fir trees have proliferated because they no longer were thinned by low–intensity fires, and now the overcrowding is especially severe.

In the higher–elevation forests of the Northern Rockies, in centuries past, the large stands of lodgepole pine burned in mosaic patterns as a result of infrequent fires of various intensities. Due to fire suppression over the last century, these forests have become more uniformly old across the landscape, and thus susceptible to mass mortality from bark beetle epidemics. This creates an accumulation of dead fuel that favors larger, more uniformly severe fires. Stands have become very crowded, don't show the same “mosaic” patterns they once did, and now burn in fires that tend to be significantly larger – burning enormous swaths of the landscape –– and of greater intensity than they were in the past. These roaring, high–intensity forest fires in the Northern Rockies make the national TV news nearly every summer.

In pre–Settlement times in the drier sites of the Northern Rockies, such as east of the Continental Divide and around Yellowstone Park, Douglas fir grew in patchy, open, grassy stands where low-intensity fires came through at intervals of 20 to 40 years and served as a natural thinning agent. Some of these Douglas fir trees grew to four feet in diameter and 500 years old. Since heavy cattle grazing began around 1900, combined with fire suppression, many of these areas where large, openly spaced Douglas fir once flourished have become choked with dense thickets of small Douglas fir trees. These thickets, too, are susceptible to large fires of great heat and intensity.

Where, in the past, fire was a natural agent that thinned and shaped the forests of the Northern Rockies into mosaics of open stands of larger trees interspersed with somewhat denser stands, today's fires can kill all trees over a wide area and damage soils and watersheds. In other words, the forests today possess far less ecological resiliency.

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