Word: forested
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...outskirts of Flagstaff, Ariz., Wally Covington drives his pickup truck through a forest choked with nearly impenetrable thickets of ponderosa pines. At last he arrives at the spot where, 10 years ago, he and his colleagues took chain saws to hundreds of trees no bigger than telephone poles, carted off the trunks and branches, and then set fires to clear away the understory. Today the result of these Bunyanesque labors is a marvel to behold, a sun-dappled woodland arched over by the branches of 300-year-old trees and, in the spaces between them, a profusion of grasses...
This summer, with blazes erupting once again across the West--from Arizona to Montana, Idaho, the Pacific Northwest and Canada--the concerns long raised by Covington and others are fueling an intense debate. Should the U.S. Forest Service, in the name of protecting communities and restoring ecological balance, authorize tree thinning on a massive scale? If it does, what size trees ought to be thinned and in what sorts of forests? And if it does not, what are the alternatives...
...Covington the unexpected loss of so many old-growth specimens was a wake-up call. Before setting fire loose in the forest again, he concluded that the forest had to be made more fire tolerant, and that meant restoring it to its original structure. For guidance, he and his colleagues turned to old photographs and historic texts, all of which confirmed that prior to European settlement, the ponderosa pine forests of the Southwest looked very different, with "every foot...covered with the finest grass," wrote a traveler who passed through the area in the mid-1800s, "and unencumbered with brush...
...even more detailed guide to what these forests originally looked like came from records kept by early foresters, who in 1909 established a series of experimental plots across the Southwest. Among these was an unlogged eight-acre plot in the Coconino that was set aside as a long-term control. Covington and his colleagues made 1876 the reference year for this plot--it was the year the last fire occurred--and then proceeded to reconstruct the way the forest had looked at the time. The difference between then and now, they found, was dramatic. In 1876 the plot boasted just...
...humidity and, last but not least, fuel load. Variations in fuel load create the equivalent of speed bumps in the landscape that serve to slow fire down, and the problem we have now is that this patchiness in many places has all but disappeared--replaced by vast tracts of forest that are uniformly dense with unburned kindling...