I am sure beyond any reasonable certainty that except for a few very limited cases where a fire break is very valuable, a 100 % cut is too much.
My scaling estimates for the Sierraville District of the Tahoe NF and the Beckwourth District of the Plumas used 50% over 25 years to produce 40 railcars per day of biomass as the levelized biomass removal requirement.
The senior land managers (USFS) assure me that 50% is too little and too slow. That was what I thought when I made the calculations, which they agree are a reasonable model.
Here’s a link to the paper, if that doesn’t work we can always figure out email. It is a spreadsheet model that uses the Excel mortgage-amortization function.
I think 75% is more likely the correct answer than 50%. You don’t like 80%. My friend who is descended from the Onceler population (if you know your Dr. Seuss references) likes 90%, but I think that may be because of poor pricing within the decision process. My climate-change-hawk economics tells me that at efficient pricing and rights assignments he would be optimizing total forest carbon and cutting trees to produce, in maybe a hundred years, a forest that the ancestors of our Maidu/Paiute/Washoe neighbors would recognize, something we may never see if we don’t change the road we’re on.
Steep is hard and expensive (meaning it requires work). I don’t know how preferred density changes with slope and orientation. I’m just an economist. My logger friends love working on steep and sensitive, because it puts their skills to work, they get paid boatloads, and they love taking care of their environment. We know how to do this, we just need institutional support.
Last summer’s North Complex fire blew up on the dense post-clearcut “wild and scenic” no-touch zone of the left bank of the Middle Fork Feather. The fire had walked and jogged across the high country of the right bank, through forests that had been thinned according to the prescriptions of the Quincy Library Group program. Less than 75%, on strategic sites. Far less than a well-informed Lorax might ask, in a forests recovery program. It mosied down into the bottom of the canyon as ground fire, and sat there gently smouldering until the wind increased and shifted to North Northeast.
The wind in the untreated (no-touch, because of Wild and Scenic protection) blew the right-bank ground fire into the crown, and immediately onto the left-bank steeps. It was a full-on firestorm when it got to the south rim, within minutes, and then had enough east-wind push for the storm to run down into the upper-Butte human communities, which were just as ill-prepared as in Paradise.
You know, 0% removal.
"Happily,” the Middle Fork Feather is wild and scenic, so when the mud pours off those steep slopes later this spring, and for the next few years, it’ll go straight into Lake Oroville, and won't foul much else except for the Kokanee gravel beds .
Those no-touch areas were clearcut, most of them twice, and the dense same-age same-species stands that burned are about as natural as, say, the nearby Laporte mining mess. Note the pug, as popular in Plumas then as now, except now it is the tough guys who have them.
Here’s a little piece of 0% removal in my neighborhood. The property owners don’t make enough in Social Security to pay for the needed work. The Beckwourth Solution addresses this really bad problem, whose sad fruits we saw in Paradise.
Thanks again for reading and commenting
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