One of the things you cover extensively in the book is why logging after fires can be so ecologically detrimental. Why are these so-called “snag” forests of dead trees so important?
Fires, including mixed-intensity fires, have been burning in the forests of this planet for over 350 million years. We’ve had fires, including high-intensity fire patches, in our forests since 100 million years before the dinosaurs walked the Earth. These are deep evolutionary processes, and there’s a deep evolutionary history of dependence and relationships with ecosystems and wildlife species related to that.
And it’s not just fire that burns at low intensity and creeps along the surface. Some species like that just fine, but others like it hot and they need the areas where fire burns more intensely and kills most, or all, the trees in patches.
It turns out that these places where fire or drought or other natural processes kill most or all the trees, these places are not destroyed. They’re not damaged from a biodiversity standpoint. They’re ecological treasures.
These snag forests are oftentimes areas that support the single highest levels of wildlife abundance and diversity in the entire forest ecosystem in a given region, provided that those areas are not subjected to post-disturbance logging — what they call “salvage logging” — which destroys all that wonderful rich complex habitat by taking away those dead trees that so many wildlife species need.
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