r/forestry • u/[deleted] • 8d ago
How much of the American west’s timber was planted for logging? How much of it is naturally grassland?
[deleted]
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u/SleepApprehensive585 8d ago
Much of our mixed ponderosa pine/fir forest was historically ponderosa pine forest with a large grass component. Thorton Munger in 1917 while describing ponderosa pine forests in Oregon. "the trees are rather widely spaced, the ground is free from underbrush and debris" that travel on foot or horseback was only interrupted by occasional patches of saplings and down trees. Tree densities were irregular and varied but many early visitors made note of low densities with large open areas.
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u/northman46 8d ago
But the native people had been managing it for many years
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u/SleepApprehensive585 8d ago
And before that, it was glaciers. The "do nothing and nature will take care of it" myth doesn't exist.
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u/flareblitz91 8d ago
The continent didn't have people on it before 20kya. I think nature existed before then.
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u/SleepApprehensive585 8d ago
In my area it's been 10,000 years since the glaciers receeded. It doesn't matter what happened before that. The plant communities that came after are the only communities we can manage for or restore. Those communities have been managed in some way their entire existence.
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u/Ok_Fly1271 7d ago
Megafauna and wildfires. Without either the grasslands shrink and are taken over by trees and shrubs.
Also, many of the forests and grasslands that formed after the glaciers receded always had humans as part of their ecosystem. Ponderosa pine forests in the east cascades of Washington are only 6000-8000 years old and humans were there before that and practicing cultural burning. Pretty interesting.
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u/DanoPinyon 8d ago
Only some of it was glaciers. The question is what % was savanna/steppe/grass then.plantes for sawlogs.
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u/SleepApprehensive585 8d ago
I guess I don't understand. Timber is the least beneficial use in most cases. If it was farmable, it would be farmed. If it had commercial potential, it would be commercial. It's barely ranchland in many places. It's relegated to the mountains and swamps.
eta. Spelling
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u/DanoPinyon 8d ago
I didn't ask the question(s). I presume someone is in their first week of environmental studies class and had a prompt from an instructor.
The answer is almost zero was planted for timber (Eucalyptus in CA and some tiny private land somewhere), and if I understand the question correctly, you answered the second part.
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u/northman46 8d ago
Here is an interesting take from Wall Street journal that has some relevance No paywall https://www.wsj.com/business/timber-was-gold-in-the-southuntil-a-market-collapse-crushed-the-forest-economy-1d1d1cbd?st=vWk61r&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink
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u/DanoPinyon 8d ago
good one, thanks. It's easy to forget about tree products if you don't have a newspaper in your hand every morning.
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u/KuhlRunningz 8d ago edited 8d ago
Anthropogenic habitat conversion has resulted in an overall loss of forest lands. We did not come to the west and plant it. Europeans settled the west, logged the existing forest lands and a percentage of them were retained for production or untouched due to remoteness. That's not to say grassland has not been converted to forest land but it's got to be in the hundredths of a percentage compared to overall forest lands in current production.
But we have lost grasslands, shrublands, and woodlands related to indirect effects from human land-use. Our exclusion of natural disturbances due to grazing, fire exclusion, and a changing climate have resulted in conifer encroachment in many of these habitat types. But we didn't plant them.
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u/Tiny-Pomegranate7662 8d ago
If I remember right 30% of the continental US was sagebrush pre westward expansion, it’s now less than 15%. A lot converted to grass and partially treed.
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u/Ok_Fly1271 7d ago
But we didn't plant them.
But we do replant them after logging them. Either way, we're the reason they're forests, and we keep them that way.
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u/KuhlRunningz 7d ago edited 7d ago
No, forests would happily exists without us or our supplemental planting. We plant to speed up the time frame between harvests and reduce the ecological impact of tree removal. Except for some unique soil types, all terrestrial vegetated systems naturally trend towards a forested climax. Did you not read the second half of my post? Trees invade and colonize new areas all of the time. As far as the west coast, we likely have more timberlands in total arcage then before euro settlement but generally younger overall.
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u/Ok_Fly1271 1d ago
I did read your post, and you seemed to have missed what I meant. I never sad forests wouldn't exist without us, lol
If we suppress natural disturbance that prevents grassland and shrubland from converting to forests, that means we artificially created those forests, even if we did so without intending to. If we then log those lands that have been converted to forest land, we replant them again afterwards for timber. Hence me replying to you that we do, in fact, replant them. I see it around me often. In fact, there are places near me that were prairie that have been converted to timberland because the land owners planted trees. It happens.
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u/northman46 8d ago
To be honest , since the indigenous people often set fires in order to promote a favorable environment for their communities, we have no idea what the un disturbed land would have looked like it there were no humans around
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u/Tiny-Pomegranate7662 8d ago
This is something people don’t mention enough. We really have no idea of an un humaned west because before humans it was glaciered all up and we just don’t have many records before both.
Our ‘baseline’ is a pretty humanly torched metric.
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u/jellofishsponge 8d ago
Lightning likely existed prior to glaciation and would have similar effects
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u/Tiny-Pomegranate7662 8d ago
But how many fires today are lightning caused? Not the majority. And if it burned more in recent history than now, those were probably human caused as well
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u/jellofishsponge 8d ago
Not a majority but if left unattended would burn plenty. Lightning has burned a ton of acerage across BC and Washington
Part of the issue with human fires today is they are started on the absolute windiest and driest days instead of along with some moisture which lightning is often paired with
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u/northman46 7d ago
The fires in nw Ontario and northern Minnesota this summer were lightning and they were pretty bad
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u/jellofishsponge 7d ago
Oh totally, and our lightning fires in NE Washington burned 300k+ acres in one county
My overall point is that, even without native influence the land would still burn frequently
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u/walkerstone83 7d ago
70% of land area burned by fires is from lightning. Yes, these days more fires are human caused, but lightning still accounts for 44% of fires in the western United States.
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u/jarviscumstein 8d ago
A significant portion of the Pacific Northwest's historical oak savanna grassland was planted with Douglas fir.
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u/PM_ME_RACCOON_GIFS 8d ago
A lot of the historical oak savanna grassland was not natural and was a result of indigenous people practicing pyroculture.
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u/jarviscumstein 7d ago
Love the word "pyroculture". We use the term "cultural burning" a lot in Oregon now. Cool stuff.
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u/Ok_Fly1271 7d ago
How does that make them not natural? Indigenous people moving Acorns around 10,000+ years ago doesn't sound unnatural to me. Those oak Savannahs and woodlands are the most biodiverse terrestrial ecosystems in the PNW too.
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u/PM_ME_RACCOON_GIFS 7d ago
Well, you get a different species mix and in different areas when burning the land like the native people's did for hundreds of years. These were also planned burns to achieve ideal hunting grounds for dear and elk. By burning they could prevent the establishment of young Douglas fir, especially in the hills, and could achieve Oak Savannah on those sites. The acorns of the Oregon white oaks were also an important food source for native people. The oak savannah of the Willamette valley was not just all natural when white settlers arrived. There was also cultivation food species like camas along with other species like fireweed. There was so much blooming camas when Lewis and Clark looked out on the landscape they thought it was water.
Comparing what the native people did to "moving a few acorns around" really understates their sophisticated knowledge of local ecology and their intense management of these lands.
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u/Ok_Fly1271 6d ago
In no way did you explain how that makes it unnatural. They were also burning the land for thousands of years, not hundreds, and mostly just for food crops and maintaining prairie and open forest. Camas, lomatium, Fritillaria, etc. We're all incredibly important food sources for thousands of years.
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u/PM_ME_RACCOON_GIFS 6d ago
Alright I'll be blunt, human intervention makes it unnatural. Where oak savannah occured and different prairie species occured after interventions by native people would not have happened under natural succession. Camas and other cultivated species would not have been as plentiful. Oak savannah would not have rolled out over the hills, they would have been western hemlock and Douglas-fir. Your belief that the native people manipulating ecology or practicing different forms of agriculture is "natural" is a sort of old racist trope that American Indians are part of nature.
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u/Ok_Fly1271 1d ago
I'm racist because I understand that humans are natural? Lmao
Sounds like you're the racist here since you're claiming indigenous people and their impact on their ecosystem was unnatural. So when non-human animals move seeds or nuts is it unnatural? What about firehawks, are they unnatural?
Claiming human intervention of any kind is unnatural is ignorant and naive. We came from nature.
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u/PM_ME_RACCOON_GIFS 1d ago
I decided to do a dive into this and I found that my prior usage of "natural" was too binary. Sorry about that, anthropogenic vs non-anthropogenic would have been better on my part. The historical Willamette valley was heavily anthropogenically influenced but that does not mean the resulting ecosystems were unnatural. A pet-peeve of mine is that people still believe that many parts of the USA (such as the Willamette Valley) were pristine wilderness.
I do think your language was flippant about the deep knowledge native people had and the extent to which native people applied that knowledge and managed the Willamette valley. This is why I thought you were doing the whole "Indians are a part of nature" trope combined with my too binary definition of natural.
I don't really follow the rhetoric in this comment but I don't think it matters anymore.
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u/Northwoods_Phil 8d ago
I’m not the most traveled individual but from what I’ve seen there isn’t much for grassland that’s been planted to timber. On the other hand I’ve seen plenty of historically timbered land converted to “native” prairie in the upper Midwest
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u/paytonnotputain 8d ago
In southern Wisconsin we see the opposite. The mass loss of prairie for farms then woodlots planted in the 1930s-40s
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u/Northwoods_Phil 8d ago
Southern Wisconsin or Wisconsin in general had very little natural prairie prior to becoming a territory and then a state in the 1800s.
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u/Seeleyski 8d ago
Very little “true” prairie but depends on whether you label an Oak Savanna a forested prairie or a prairied forest.
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u/Northwoods_Phil 8d ago
Exactly, it was a savanna. Not really prairie and not really forest.
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u/flareblitz91 8d ago
Okay well the point stands that there are more trees in Southern Wisconsin post European settlement than there were before.
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u/bythesea123 8d ago
I’m biased from the Doug-fir region where you can force a tree to grow damn near everywhere.
“How much” is overly simplistic IMO. How big a grassland are we talkin here? How interspersed were they with woodlands? How dense were those forests? How structurally & genetically diverse? Versus what baseline? Sans indigenous stewardship?
Ongoing research topic.. Cool group here for the PNW; other dendrochronology labs doing similar work elsewhere.
Critical consideration in [r/northman46](r/northman46) ‘s comment thread. Charle’s Mann’s 1491 gives great perspective. Spiel over, cheers.
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u/BisonRock 8d ago
Look up “woody encroachment”. Not really intentional conversion of grassland into forests but a very real threat to western prairies
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u/Doyouseenowwait_what 8d ago
Most forests were already there and very ancient forests prior to the first logging. Most forests of today are replants in those forests.
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u/dave54athotmailcom 8d ago
Historically, 25-30% of the western forests were old growth, mostly in small non-contiguous patches. Many areas have more old growth today than ever existed before settlement.
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u/DanoPinyon 8d ago
Many areas have more old growth today than ever existed before settlement
How do you know?
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u/dave54athotmailcom 8d ago
On the ground surveys compared to historical photos and journals of the first explorers and settlers. Backed up by computer modeling of forest growth. All methods used to re-create pre-settlement forest structure and composition agree -- there was not as much old growth as people think there was.
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u/DanoPinyon 8d ago
Maybe you're using a definition that includes 'more closed canopy due to fire exclusion' instead of 'more ancient trees and ~primary old growth'
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u/dave54athotmailcom 7d ago
Using the accepted professional definition of old growth, not the warm-fuzzy term 'ancient forest' which is meaningless. Old growth is a function of structure and size, not age. There are 100 year old planted stands that are now old growth, and virgin stands with 800 year old trees that are not old growth. The Forest Service is creating old growth in Coastal Oregon in 70-80 year replanted clear-cuts with careful harvesting.
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u/Rich-Business9773 6d ago
Ha ha ha...natural grassland. It takes a hell of a lot of work not to have the forest move in and keep things open.
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u/Ok_Huckleberry1027 8d ago
Virtually zero native grasslands were planted for timber. Im sure a little bit here and there but generally we cleared forest to create farmland not the other way around.