Blog 09

This past week we had The Nature Conservancy come in and give a presentation on their land acquisition and preservation organization. They have obtained many areas of land in the Keweenaw region to preserve from development. While I agree, a lot of the presentation was loaded down with the financial aspects of their struggles, I don't think that it was out of place. It's important to consider that many of their successes and struggles have been financially related as they try to pay and for these parcels of land. These financial successes have been a large part of their work, so it is very important to them. Personally I would have liked to have heard more about some of the actual areas of land that they had. She went into some brief descriptions, but I would have enjoyed hearing more about what specific things/trails there are at each park.

There was also a lot of discussion this past week on logging, logging methods, and new/old growth forest. A close family friend of ours works as a forest manager for Nicolet National Forest in northern Wisconsin. This Saturday I called him with a few questions regarding some of these issues and ideas surrounding foresting techniques. I summarized the information he gave me:

Forest management isn't operated in the same way that is it was in the earlier logging days. It was partially that people didn't know how the forests responded to large scale clearing, but also clear cuts were done out of convenience often. Many logging companies were removing all trees, so everyone else felt the need to do the same thing to keep up and profitable. From a conservation standpoint, clear cuts are rarely done now in many of our areas. Because of clear cuts, the composition and make-up of many of our forest has changed, a lot of the topsoil is often lost, leaving a dryer clay soil. So select cuts are often performed to help give sunlight to undergrowth (young trees) so that they have more of a chance in the different soil.

I found this interesting how previous clear cuts have caused some forest to almost require maintenance select cuts for regrowth. He mentioned how they do not select cut in older forests that are already sustainable. He also mentioned that some foresting is also done to stop the spreading of diseases such as oak wilt.