Hacker News Reader

Comment by bradley13 | Hacker News Reader

There is a difference between a forest and a tree plantation. It is deceptive to call a tree plantation a "forest".

Sure, both contain trees, but the plantation is a monoculture, with all the problems that brings. Also, the trees are not allowed to mature - they are harvested as soon as they reach a certain size.

If you removed plantations from the listed forests, people would be shocked. Actual, natural forest? There isn't really all that much of it...

View on HN

> If you removed plantations from the listed forests, people would be shocked.

The vast majority of Canadian forests are not plantations and are, in fact, actual natural forest.

In fact, we learned our lessons about "mono-culture tree plantations" in the 80s and a lot of replanting is mixed except in areas that already had naturally occurring mono-cultures.

See my reply to the earlier comment. More than half of Canadian forests are "commercial¨, i.e., tree plantations.

There is a reply that directly disputes this.

"Commercial" means that it is privately owned and can possibly be logged. Not that it has been logged and replanted.

Calling large swaths of forest that have never been logged in human history "tree plantations" because they can be legally harvested at some point is, at best, disingenuous.

>Actual, natural forest? There isn't really all that much of it...

Can you quantify "not really much"? Because I don't think you're correct; I think that Canada has tons of natural forest.

The most specific figures I found for Canada: Of 417.6 million hectares of forest, 234.5 million hectares are "commercial forests", i.e., tree plantations.

There are about 3.47 million km2 of forest and of that 2.06 million km2 are covered by a management plan that includes production, conservation or other uses[1]. That does not mean all 2 million km2 are tree plantations. In fact relatively little will be - there is a ton of natural forest in that area and it's not all for commercial use.

The rest of the 3.47 million km2 is located in more remote and northern areas and often relatively undisturbed by human activity. Accessibility is the distinction, not if it's a plantation or not.

[1] https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/16-201-x/2018001/sec-2-e...

'Not much' means 180 million hectares? So just an area three times the size of France.

This doesn't imply that the forest remains untouched, unlogged, or unmanaged.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37336122

The way op put it did imply it, but I take your point that it doesn't actually mean it.

Have you never left a city? The idea that half the forests in Canada are plantations should be ridiculous on its face.

A "plantation" in this sense is something that has been planted by man sometime in the last 100 years. Many forests you see which are 40 or 70 years old look like real wild forests, but are in fact planted.

Don't forget that trees in Canada grow slowly compared to for example trees in a jungle.

The entire world deforests around 10m hectares per year commercially[1]. It doesn't follow that the global economy could support 200m+ hectares of plantations, never mind 200m+ in Canada alone.

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/deforestation

I suspect that 234.5 million just means: crown land permitted for forestry development, not reflecting its actual replanted vs not-replanted status.

I recently went on a canoe trip through some of the old growth forest in Ontario that has never been logged, and it was remarkably different than sections of the forest that has been thoroughly logged in the last century.

Wouldn't a plantation also be less likely to burn as it's maintained better as there is a monetary incentive to do so?

Actually not really they burn quicker and hotter since the tree planters are meant to put a pine or spruce tree very regularly every 6-8 feet in more or less a grid which gives the resulting trees a very bushy characteristic and crowds out the wet undergrowth that an older forest would have

Not mentioning that the old discarded branches from the original logging are left behind to bake in the sun for 2-3 years before replanting which don’t really decay very fast

For the first 10-20 years after logging an old cut block is like a pile of very dry fuel

I bought 800 acres of land that was clear cut in the early 2000s, I'm letting it reforest naturally. The dead wood was gone in less than 10 years, 20 years is a stretch.

To be clear, clear cutting is a horrible practice, as is mono-culture planting.

In my country all forests were planted. Apparently as early as the 17th century we had to import wood from the Baltics for ship building.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com