A photographer captures life in America's last remaining old-growth forests
npr.org
npr.org
We don't live in a true old-growth forest, but it's pretty close. There are definitely many hundred year old trees.
We manage our five acres very, very minimally, and we're actively re-foresting most of the ~1ac of yards that were mowed prior to us moving here in 2020.
As another commenter said, this is the most beautiful natural environment I've ever seen, and we're extremely grateful that this has become our forever home.
Btw, I will check your PNW and raise you the Green Mountains in VT and White Mountains in NH during the fall.
Pretty broad statement to make about a country of 300+ million people.
Especially in a thread of people appreciating it.
again, obviously this is colloquial and not everyone will fit neatly into one of those two categories, but as i've traveled around the various continents, that's the _general_ theme i detect in conversations.
I've long been unimpressed with the ancient and eroded 'mountains' of the East when set against the tall and imposing Mountains of the West. The Rockies and Cascades just hit different.
I suspect it was fern spores that I had an allergic reaction to, because I had a similar experience in an area of New South Wales that has a lot of ferns.
It still turned out to be a great trip. We drove up to Seattle, stopped at El Chupacabra, then went out to North Cascades National Park for a couple of days before heading home.
Washington is such a beautiful state with so much diversity in the landscape. I love driving through the state from East to West because you see it all. Even better, I flew from Seattle to Minneapolis once and it was a clear sunny day for the whole trip. The view out the window was breathtaking and seeing the landscape change from forest to desert to forest to prairie and farmland was just the coolest thing. And flying over the mountains and seeing lakes up there all secluded. Beautiful.
"The oldest trees are estimated to be over 200 years old." https://www.oldgrowthforest.net/md-schoolhouse-woods
"The age of the oldest trees is not certain, but 100 rings have been counted on a downed loblolly pine and a downed chestnut oak. There is no old-growth forest in this park, however, the strong protections put in place on this forest ensure that it may recover in time." https://www.oldgrowthforest.net/va-james-river-park-system
(The exact definition of old-growth isn't agreed on, but I've seen some foresty documents in the PNW that demand tree age of 400+ years as a prerequisite for the old-growth categorization)
Age matters because there are several "thresholds" during which the diversity of species significantly increases and that starts with the older trees falling and decomposing. The conifers in the PNW take anywhere from 50-150 years to decompose before they start breaking apart and littering the forest floor. Once the first generation of trees is broken up and spread around by the wildlife and the fungi species are fully established, the growth of third/fourth/fifth generation of trees and plants become a lot more vigorous. When the second and third generation of trees start falling, they end up creating the dense habitats that supports large food webs from the rodents on up. All the while, the tree roots pull nutrients from deeper and deeper in the earth, allowing the rain and cold to build up a layer of peat on the forest floor that cycles and stores the nutrients, improving the quality of the dirt.
It just takes a while for all these processes to build up.
I think most oaks top out ~100 years and pines ~200. Not as much slow-growth, live-forever stuff.
https://www.starnewsonline.com/story/news/2009/06/13/airlie-...
I thought super-long-lived trees tended to have special biological optimizations to persist over centuries.
E.g. https://www.nps.gov/parkhistory/online_books/shirley/sec6.ht...
Huh? A heifer generally won't have her first calf before two years of age. If you are only getting two productive years out of your typical cow, you're doing something horribly wrong.
Calf 3-5 months Heifer 8-10 months milk cow 4-5 years Bull 18-20 months
https://www.swissveg.ch/life-expectancy?language=en
Looks close to US ranch:
> Meat or beef cows live for 1.5-2 years in the commercial beef industry. However, the natural life of beef cattle is between 15-20 years. Heifers and cows (female cattle) often live for between 5-6 years as they breed to produce the next generation of beef cattle.
https://ohthatschelsey.com/how-long-does-a-cow-live/#:~:text....
Todays milk caws are bred for producing a LOT of milk (30/60L/day), in comparaison those not bred for that produce 4L/day. However this quantity does not keep vealing after vealing and they became unprofitable soon.
> If you are only getting two productive years out of your typical cow, you're doing something horribly wrong.
What do you mean by wrong ? These are the figures of modern practice.
I'll assume I misread "caw". But this apparent multi-sexed beef cattle beast you now speak of is even stranger still.
> What do you mean by wrong ? These are the figures of modern practice.
Under modern practices, the productive lifespan of a cow is usually around 4-5 years, as echoed by your links[1]. If you're only getting two out of your typical cow, something is afoot with the management of your herd. If you are culling them before their productivity has been exhausted, how are you squaring the resources you put into their unproductive early years? In other words, how the hell is your farm managing to stay profitable if you find a cow older than four to be abnormal?
[1] Which was strange in its own right. Can you not speak to the subject yourself?
Thanks to point that out, my English isn’t perfect and a quick search show me that a caw is a female :-)
> speak to the subject yourself
I wasn't explicit enough here neither: "we slaughter [...]" -> "Humans slaughter [...]". I'm not farmer, just some random guy.
For the profitability part : "The value of cull cows at slaughter represents a source of income for dairy farms."[1]
However the profitability incentives varies depending on the breed and lead to ...strange... practices: the male newborn are hardly profitable if from a diary-super-optimized breed and some farms culled them at birth [2]. It's now forbidden in UK but still a practice in Switzerland (yummy Toblerone).
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S002203021...
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/mar/26/dairy-di...
There are no footpaths, the undergrowth is both dense but also strong - we aren't talking stuff you can push aside.
Each forest is different. The above is a general guideline, but consult a proper forester for information on any particular forest and what the natural state should be!
Of course that's what I meant though.
Many (most?) PNW forests sit on very deep peatlands. When they burn, it's a catastrophic release of captured carbon like the fires Canada has been experiencing over the last few years. Once those fires start, it becomes a vicious cycle of fire drying out deeper peat which burns the next fire season, sometimes smoldering underground for years before burning out.
Second growth forests that have been left untouched for 20 or more years are complete snarls. Young trees are more likely to fall down in a storm, and the open canopy lets in enough sun that you get all kinds of dense undergrowth amid the fallen trees.
But the PNW old growth forests have such a dark tree canopy that not much other than moss and ferns grow below. The 1000+ year old trees rarely fall down, so you don't have as much fallen logs, either. It's a pretty incredible experience to walk through a mossy forest of giants like that.
An old growth redwood forest, for example, will often have large areas with no trees except redwoods. The bottom ten feet of the forest, where you walk around, can be nothing except smooth vertical trunks, with a thick covering of needles on the ground. No undergrowth at all, because the bottom of the forest lives in permanent shade, and the redwoods change the chemical balance of the soil in a way that makes it hard for other plants to grow.
Two minutes of searching revealed that ESRI provides software to said project.
> If I could find a SWE job doing something connected to this plan
https://www.esri.com/en-us/about/careers/job-search?category...
That said, I do feel conflicted about this type of forest management. It may work on the Olympic Peninsula where risk of fire is minimal. It does not work in the large forests of California which are tinder-dry and experience very hot summers.