Partnership to test if forest thinning can grow groundwater
By Edward Ortiz, Sacramento Bee
The purchase of 10,000 acres of watershed land west of Lake Tahoe is slated to launch a living laboratory testing whether the answer to drought lies in fewer trees.
Research by the environmental group the Nature Conservancy has shown that thinning forests of small- to medium-size trees and bushes allows forests to trap more rain because it lets more water run off to streams and into groundwater stores. In winter, thinned areas may also allow more snow to be deposited on the forest floor as snowpack, said Edward Smith, a forest ecologist with the Nature Conservancy.
The Palo Alto-based Northern Sierra Partnership, which includes the conservancy, seeks to put that theory into practice on former logging land it’s bought for $10.1 million about 10 miles west of Lake Tahoe and south of Interstate 80 in Placer County. It’s one of the largest pieces of unprotected land south of Donner Summit and the Tahoe National Forest.
Thinning the trees to grow groundwater. How about logging in the residential areas to reduce fire danger where people live in a forest thick with pine trees.
I know that will never fly as it’s much easier to log in the open woods. Sharpen them chainsaws boys… It’s cutting time! OLS
Interesting idea.
As Mike Dombeck, U.S.F.S Chief under Clinton wrote, in an open letter to Governor Schwarzenegger on January 1st, 2004, forests are ‘water factories’, as snow-pack works as a reservoir prior to melt – captured on branches above, & as ground-cover below, it is the change in seasons (rising temperatures) that fulfill that part of nature’s mechanism. . .if those “medium-sized trees & bushes cannot capture their part, not being there, it is the soil that takes it in more directly, but can be subject to erosion absent adequate ground-cover…
In the case of a Nature Conservancy project, it will be soil conservation making the difference, via increasing the water retention qualities, to allow for a longer time span for moisture in the soil, offset by the missing trees & vegetation that thinning does, if in excess. . .
Soil conservation is a missing ecologic link, as soil retaining more moisture empowers more growth via photosynthesis, as water is retained long enough for that process to work towards healthier forests. with an an added benefit of being way more fire & beetle resistant. . .