Interventions & adaptive management
The emphasis for the project is on maintaining grassland or open forest, and the interventions utilized match that: a combination of prescribed burning and removal of trees (both commercial harvesting and non-commercial thinning). The Forest Stewardship Plan sets a goal of restoring 4,500 hectares per year (Harris 2011). This target combines all types of treatment: plans for 2015 include burning 2,293 hectares and thinning and pile burning or thinning and masticating 2,864 hectares. Although prescribed burning appears to be the only treatment for nearly half of the area, some reviews have advocated more timber harvesting. One call to increase the amount of harvesting relative to prescribed burning states that burning alone has been ineffective in killing Ponderosa Pine over 5 cm and Douglas fir over 10 cm (Ross, 2013). Another states that revenue gained from harvesting would make the project more sustainable (Ross, 2005). In their 2011 restoration plan, RMTERP states a preference for harvesting followed by prescribed fire, since prescribed fire intense enough to kill larger diameter trees causes adverse effects such as depletion of the seed bank; thinning followed by burning is common practice in other areas with similar ponderosa pine grassland ecosystems such as northern Arizona (Roccaforte, Fule´ & Covington, 2009).
Mastication, which may be cheaper than other treatments, is also being tested, although no outcomes have been published other than an informal presentation (Rocky Mountain Trench Ecosystem Restoration Program, 2013). Mastication is the "chipping" of woody material, either whole live trees, the lower limbs of live trees, or dead wood accumulated on the forest floor. Mastication is an increasingly common "fuel management" tool (Kreye et al., 2014) and is perhaps more associated with hazard reduction than ecosystem restoration; while it effectively reduces available fuel, Potts and Stephens (2009) found that in the Sierra Nevada, prescribed fire reduces more non-native grasses. |
Rocky Mountain Trench Blueprint for Action 2013, retrieved from http://trencher.com/images/uploads/Blueprint2013_summaryweb.pdf
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