In your opinion, what have we learned about ecological succession and disturbance that can be used to manage forests and other natural areas in a sustainable manner? Are there ways to mimic nature? Feel free to do additional research on this topic. For inspiration, please view the following video from the Vermont Land Trust. (transcript from video below as well as the link)
Hi, I’m Ethan Tapper, the Chittenden County Forester and we’re out here at the Andrews Community Forest in Richmond.
Andrews Community Forest is a 428 acre town owned property, acquired by the town in 2018 and conserved by the Vermont Land Trust, with the help from the Vermont Housing Conservation Board.
And so what we’re doing out here right now is demonstrating forest management done well, and trying to do it in this really open and transparent and inclusive way.
So the work that we’re doing is unusual in a couple of different ways.
One way is that we’re doing what’s called ecological forest management.
So we’re trying to manage our forests to be more like old growth forests, and to manage them based on forests natural disturbance dynamics.
The way that they change and grow and develop over time.
The other thing that’s unusual about it, is that we’re trying to do this in a way that is really open, transparent and inclusive, that brings people in and shows them why this is something that we don’t need to be afraid of, this is something we can be really proud of.
And so I’m standing here in what we call a group.
It’s a small opening in the forest that we’ve created, that’s supposed to simulate a small disturbance events.
So a little wind microburst, what happens when a bunch of trees fall over in a small area.
And as you can see, it looks really messy, just like it would look if a windstorm had come through here and blown all these trees over.
Now in ecological forest management messiness is not something that we wanna do away with, it’s actually something that we wanna encourage.
So instead of simplicity in uniformity, we wanna encourage irregularity and messiness and what I would call weirdness.
Leaving individual trees to grow as long as they wanna grow, leaving deadwood on the ground, creating pockets of trees of all different shapes and sizes.
This is a way that we increase the wildlife habitat benefits of the work that we’re doing, the resilience of our forests, the health of our forests, and help them be more like old growth forests.
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