Aba Incieni
Gold Member
- Dec 13, 2017
- 8,910
- 1,282
So when Moonbeam claims thinning is called for to prevent these wildfires, is he wrong or lying?Get it straight. Thinning serves very little good as a fire management tool. There is a little thing called "succession" that destroys any notion that thinning is nothing more than a short term tactic. Does anyone here understand what succession is? You must know this, then understand the types of vegetation that come into the picture after a thinning. If not, an intelligent debate is not possible.You can't thin all the time. That is a horrible forest management tactic. Timber management involves and manages for higher yields of pulp or lumber. There is a specific plan for that. You first remove the culls or the overcrowded timber to gain more volume for the healthier trees. That initial cutting is timber stand improvement. Which does not take fire control into consideration. To obtain quality lumber, you must manage the stems to get the tallest and straightest. Position of the trees, slope, competition, cat faces, etc. decide which one's are removed initially. Has nothing to do with fire protection.Negative! If you search back, I said that thinning is only a temporary fix, and that it could make the fire danger even greater after a short period of time. You will have to go back, but I definitely put that in there. But the bottom line, thinning is no cure all. It opens the forest floor up to annual grasses in the first year of successional growth, leading to the second and third year of weeds and small brush. A prime ignitor for a possible high fire danger category 5 day, if the weather conditions permit.You've been telling someone that we can't just thin once, that we have to do it continuously?
I don't believe you ever told anyone that, let alone for two days.
That's why you have to keep doing it.
Put in more logging roads too, pull out the dead trees.
You can't thin all the time. That is a horrible forest management tactic.
We've tried never thinning, how'd that work out?
To obtain quality lumber, you must manage the stems to get the tallest and straightest.
Yup, harvest that quality lumber.
Has nothing to do with fire protection.
Every tree you take out is one less tree that can burn.
At the end of the day, the timber companies care about volume of wood, and what revenue it brings. A very small percentage of the forestry industry other than the government concerns itself with fire protection. Lumber companies are not in the business of fire control. Their interest is volume/money.
At the end of the day, not thinning in national forests, or thinning on lumber company lands, changes very little of the fire danger potential of each area. Nature recovers extremely rapidly in fresh cut areas as it's need for succession becomes evident very quickly. Nature is always working towards a climatic forest in the end. But the first three years of that change come the quickest in those years. Therefore, we are back to square one as if nothing ever happened.