What is a healthy forest?
Healthy forests do not have even rows of same-age trees and most often have different levels of diverse plant and sapling growth among the larger trees. Healthy forests are not monocultures that are often seen where trees are grown as crops to be harvested.
So what makes a “healthy forest?” Watch the video below to see what makes up a forest that is healthy and biodiverse.
This animated film takes you on a 4-minute journey that represents 300 years in the life of a forest. See how structure and biodiversity recover naturally, and how continued management like thinning and harvesting interferes with recovery. Created by the Old-Growth Forest Network, a US organization that “speaks for the trees.”
“Old-growth features include diverse tree-related structures that provide diverse wildlife habitat that increases the biodiversity of the forested ecosystem. The concept of diverse tree structure includes multi-layered canopies and canopy gaps, greatly varying tree heights and diameters, and diverse tree species and classes and sizes of woody debris.” Wikipedia
Extra Credit: Listen to an interview with Joan Maloof, Director of Old-Growth Forest Network, on the Rewilding Earth Podcast! You can also listen to Bob Leverett On Vital Importance Of Old Growth, Carbon Sequestration, and Forest Recovery.
See also: The duality of Garden and Wilderness, Around the Campfire #43
Director of Digital Outreach (D.O.D.O.) for The Rewilding Institute
Host and Producer of the Rewilding Earth Podcast
Jack started Rewilding work as Executive Director of Sky Island Alliance in the mid-1990’s, organizing the Sky Island Wildlands Network design, ripping up illegal roads on forest service lands, installing wolf acclimatization pens on Ted Turner’s Ladder Ranch & conducting howling surveys to help make way for the final stage of the Lobo reintroduction program in the Southwest.
Through the years, Jack has worked with Dave Foreman and the Rewilding Gang to further Rewilding initiatives and education.