Post-logging succession on alluvium. One-acre blocks. Unlike upland succession it features lush understory & red alder, with spruces often suppressed & dispersed. Succession on stream deposits rarely enters conifer canopy closure. Fish and wildlife values remain high throughout succession. To recover old-growth majesty of the first, left-side block will require probably 300 years. But we so far have no riparian logging of that antiquity to study.
In 2006, Dave Sherman and Bob Christensen counted 700 rings just in the outer rind of this redcedar, sacrificed on the southern timberlands. She may have been among the first generation to colonize what eventually became Lingít Aaní.
A thousand years in 4 sidebars
My deepest immersion in matters of Alaskan forestry—how humans use, misuse, and repair these ancient habitats—happened from 1996 to 2009. The first decade of that span was devoted to Landmark Trees, documenting our finest tall-tree spruce stands.
Then in 2005, with Bob Christensen and leaders of Sitka Conservation Society, we transitioned to the Ground-truthing Project, assessing what was wrong and what could be better about our relationship with the forest.
So, between the first (1992) and third (2014) editions of The Nature of Southeast Alaska. I learned enough to pepper the introductory Habitats chapters with ‘breaking-news’ sidebars. Four of them summarize the nuggets from those archipelago-wide travels, and I’ve merged em into a single pdf for your convenience.
Bottom line: Old-growth forest is complicated. Our Ground-truthing adventures happened at a time when campaign leaders, community-based grassroots groups and our DC lobbyists were desperately trying to distill forest ecology into simple sound-bites that resonated with conservation voters. We unfortunately found many of these claims—% “high-volume” logged, logging bad-wilderness good, 2nd-growth = fish&wildlife desert—to be exaggerated or flat out false.
There’s nothing wrong with a sound bite per se. In fact the best are like fine poetry. But they should probably be distilled by researchers and woods-folk, not urban greenies. Bob and I eventually settled on hammered gems & unproductive leftovers. My Mountaineers editor for Coming home: the land of old trees, in Amy Gulick’s Salmon in the trees, gave me a big thumbs up on hammered gems.
And, btw, “salmon in the trees” was an even better and more lucrative sound bite. Problem is (sorry folks) salmon aren’t why giant trees grow on alluvium.
Old growth is complicated. I guess that’s another sound bite.
