Restoration!

Our restoration thinning crew is working hard to help improve the forest so that it provides better wildlife habitat.

Above is one of the piles of small suppressed trees removed from the forest. By reducing the number of trees per acre we are allowing for the remaining trees to thrive and for the understory to begin to establish.

A tree ring says a thousand words! Notice how large the space between rings were and then as it became too crowded in the forest the tree becomes stressed and grows much more slowly resulting in very little space between rings.



Snow, deer, restoration

It is an exciting week for Trillium Forest. I went out to the woods Monday to go over the last minute logistics for our upcoming forest restoration project. They are out there now helping to improve forest habitat conditions.

On my way to the site I was lucky enough to spot two deer. One was slipping along on the ice that was on the road, so cute! The road is slick so if you are enjoying a winter walk please be careful out there.

The forest restoration is beginning today so you may see logging trucks and other equipment associated with our thinning project. I hope they stay warm! Stay tuned for pictures of the project in progress as we open up one of our dense forest stands.

A Walk in the Woods

A sunny Sunday means the perfect day to finish up the sign installation and photo-documentation of our upcoming restoration thinning project.

This is a typical image of the 60 acre forest stand that we are preparing to thin. Notice how close the Douglas fir trees are and how there is no understory vegetation. Not the best wildlife habitat.

Now that is some pretty understory! This is within our wetland buffer, no cutting will occur in this area.

More dense trees without understory. These are all Douglas firs that are approximately 22 years old, some are only a few inches in diameter due to the lack of nutrients, light, and carbon dioxide available.

Now that is more like it! Would you be surprised to know this is the same forest! Yep, we have some big trees in Trillium, this forest stand was previously thinned and has the nice lush understory that we are looking for. There will be no cutting in this area.

So now you have had the quick tour of our restoration thinning project and you didn't have to get dirty or bloody traveling through the forest. You're welcome. :)

Happy New Year!

Can you believe it is already 2012! Time has flown. We've been hard at work here in the office, I've even got to go out in the field a couple times!

The biggest Trillium news for this grand new year....restoration projects! We are moving forward on the forest restoration thinning. Our forest practice application is approved and our contracts are almost complete.

Thinning will take place from January 16 to February 29. The end date may change based on weather and site conditions though. Expect about six weeks if all things go smoothly.

We are keeping the property open to users during this time. However, the trails in the thinning area (marked in green on the map below) will be closed Monday - Friday. Logging trucks will be using the main road so please move out of the way of any vehicles when you are out in the forest.

This is a great project and I'm very excited about being able to improve forest health and create even better wildlife habitat. The Trillium stewardship webpage talks more about thinning.

We are hoping to learn a lot from this test thin. Some of my learning objectives include:

• Logistics for thinning operations and recreational users (signs, notices, etc)
• How do our forest stands 'respond' to thinning
• How does the public feel about forest restoration projects
• Road infrastructure impacts
• Wildlife usage changes (before, during, after)
• Many, many more... :)

Easy to say we are going to get a lot of great things from this project, I'll keep all of you up to date.

On a more humorous note. I set up the boundary flagging (which I mentioned in a previous post). Well, what I didn't say is what a bugger it was to get it all placed! Talk about a dense forest! I did forest inventory for two summers in college and this ranks as one of my most time consuming transects (or maybe I'm just rusty). But I got to see more of the forest and look forward to seeing how it will look after the thinning.