- Welcome to Marinette,
we're here in beautiful Theatre on the Bay
at the UW-Marinette campus,
next to the gracious
and beautiful shores of Green Bay.
Our presentation this evening is by Bill Cook,
he's the forester and biologist
for the MSU Extension,
the Michigan State University Extension,
but he headed southwest to Marinette
to talk to us about this, this evening,
as he does a little bit of work in northern Wisconsin,
as well as the U.P. and a little bit down
in downstate Michigan.
- Well, thanks, Scott.
This is kinda fun to cross the river
to be over in Marinette.
I do it all the time.
I grew up in Madison and went to school at Stevens Point,
so it's kinda fun to...
I never really quite recognized the border there,
except for that time change zone to the weird eastern side,
when I get over to Delta county.
But anyway, happy to hear that this
Northern Lights series is going on,
and be part of it.
It's kinda fun to be one of the Michiganders to be here.
So I'm pleased that I was asked, Scott and Tom,
so, thank you very much.
But anyway. I'm a forester.
I'm a wildlife biologist.
Been doing this for a while, working with folks,
helping them to better understand some of these ideas,
manage their own properties,
working with state and federal governments,
and companies, and consulting foresters,
and other interesting people.
It's a fun community to work with,
I've always enjoyed it,
and I probably will enjoy it for another five or six years.
Now enjoy something else, I hope.
But anyway. This is a question
that often comes up when I talk to folks,
is, why bother to manage a forest?
Doesn't nature do things just fine?
And the answer is mixed.
Mostly no.
But we'll talk about that a little bit
as we go along here.
I'm gonna start out with some "why's,
talk about some "how's,
then we'll go back to some "why's,
but the short story of why you would "management,"
is you would get more stuff.
That's what I tell my elementary school kids.
You get more stuff.
Until I walked into one classroom,
and I found out that "stuff" wasn't allowed by the teacher.
The word.
The teacher wanted students to be more explicit
than just "stuff."
But you get more stuff. Whatever that might be.
And that could be a wide range of things.
And the types of things, and the numbers of things,
and the diversity of things have grown
over the last 40 or 50 years, as you might expect.
At one point, it was mostly timber-driven.
That's still an important part of the process,
but now there's many more
considerations wrapped into that.
Bruce Zobel was a geneticist.
He died, not too terribly long ago,
at least in my viewpoint.
But he had an interesting comment to say
about forest management, and pretty much,
it's that we're going to put more and more demands
on our forest, and we're gonna have to do it
with fewer and fewer forests,
possibly in poorer and poorer condition,
facing greater numbers of threats.
So you can see that there are some challenges
that lie ahead for us,
because forests are not merely a recreational commodity,
or something like that, they're not frivolous,
they're not something that's nice to have
when you have the spare time.
We depend on them.
Our survival depends on forests,
As it does with many other things as well.
But forests usually aren't on the top of people's lists
when they think of what they need
to get through the day, or the week.
Okay, so, you get more stuff.
Talk a little bit how we get more stuff.
This is one definition of forestry,
and the important part of this phrase is,
the "benefit of society."
Foresters manage forests because they like forests.
We like forests, it's fun.
We'd rather talk to trees than people.
They're basically more interesting, most of the time,
and they don't talk back.
So it works really, really well.
But actually all of us are out there
Because we're working for the benefit of society
to produce more of those commodities and services
that forests provide to human beings.
I'm not going to talk a lot about forest ecology,
but there's a couple of things I just have to get in there.
One is this concept of succession.
It's really, really important in forests,
and other biological systems.
Essentially, it's a change over time
from one kind of vegetation type
to another kind of vegetation type.
These systems are dynamic, they're not static.
If you go back tomorrow and look at the forest,
you look at today, might look the same, probably will,
but if you come back as little as five years later,
they're gonna be some changes in there.
Those of you who own forest property
are well aware of that.
Well this process of succession can be manipulated.
Management can speed it up, it can slow it down,
it can hold it in a place for a while,
it can change direction.
We have choices with management,
and that's part of what makes management
kind of interesting.
This is another one,
this is a really important forest concept: Dots.
Dots are important to forests.
Okay, what this represents, of course, are tree stems.
if you look at them from the top,
every acre is covered with a certain percentage,
or certain amount of square feet of dots.
Now you can have a lot of little dots,
you can have a fewer amount of big dots,
you can have a lot of big dots,
you can have mixed of different sized dots,
but all those dots added up, is a concept that we use
to measure stand density,
because stand density regulates light,
which is more than just a little important
for forests and forest organisms.
And so that's one of the things that we can manipulate
is the amount of light in the forest,
and that term is something foresters call basal area.
That has to do with the high stumps of the trees,
the base, the area of all those bases,
it happens to be at four and a half feet,
not at stump height, but that area is added up,
and that's a measure, a very critical measure,
in forest ecology and forest management.
Now we're gonna jump from ecology,
and talk a little bit about silviculture,
which is the analog of agriculture.
Except silviculture involves thousands of species,
instead of one, or two, or three.
Plus the soils, and the waters,
and the other non-living components
that go along with a forest.
And this research has gone on for about 100 years,
and in the lake states here,
we pretty much have some good systems in place
to do different kinds of things,
depending on what the forest owner might want,
and what the forest and the soils
have the possibility to provide.
Obviously in northern Wisconsin,
we're not gonna be growing a whole lot of eucalyptus.
That's not a possibility.
If that's what you want,
it's gonna involve a residence change for you.
But up here, we do have some limitations of winter and soils
and weather and other things like that.
But within those constraints,
there's a whole lot of wiggle room in most cases.
I want to go back to that one there,
because a silvicultural system
will do at least two of three things,
or else it's not good forestry.
One, it will produce timber products.
That, we're all familiar with.
But more importantly, in what drives most of these systems
is securing regeneration.
if it doesn't secure regeneration,
it's not a silvicultural system.
And in some forest types, a silvicultural system
will improve the trees and the forest conditions
after a harvest, a thinning, or some other practice,
rather than degrade them.
And that's an important difference as well.
So, it's a series of practices in the woods
to do certain things within the contraints
of the environment to provide more stuff.
It can be a lot of fun.
We have three basic silvicultural systems
in the lake states:
clearcutting, shelterwooding, selection system,
and there's some things don't fit into those so well,
we call intermediate treatments.
And then there's this planting thing,
that we like to call artificial regeneration,
but it's planting.
And some of these systems involve even-aged trees,
some of our forests that have different ages.
A note on natural regeneration,
it's a common thought among many,
that we should plant two trees, or something like that,
for every tree that we cut.
Well, I think that's, we, it's a whole lot better
to provide environmental conditions
and have natural regeneration produce
hundreds or thousands of trees for every tree that we cut.
And then we don't have to plant.
And those of you who have planted a lot of trees,
on weekends, in April, or in the fall,
know that it's fun for about 10 minutes,
and then it becomes work.
And it's also expensive.
And so in our systems in the lake states,
we depend largely on natural regeneration,
and again, manipulating those environmental factors
in the forest to encourage trees to regenerate on their own,
which, when it comes right down to it,
they're basically pretty good at doing that
all by themselves, given a halfway decent chance.
And then there's four different ways trees reproduce
in the lake states. Seeds of course, most common,
but we've got a few other systems or mechanisms
that can work as well.
Now here's the big, bad word:
clearcutting.
I won't even ask how many of you
think clearcutting is a fun thing to do.
'Cause I pretty much know what the answer is.
But hopefully we're gonna retrain our eyes
just a little bit this evening to help you understand
that clearcutting is really just
a method that mimics,
not copies, exactly, but mimics,
natural disturbances.
Ecologists call them "catastrophic disturbance."
Things like wildfire, windstorm, major floodings,
huge insect defoliations that kill thousands
of acres of trees.
Those are major catastrophic disturbances,
And a lot of our tree species are dependent
upon that kind of disturbance for their survival.
They're adapted to it.
Clearcutting mimics many of those systems,
and we're getting better at clearcutting
to try to make them more similar
to natural disturbances.
But it still has a bad name to it.
Essentially it removes all the trees,
which makes people sad.
Of course, I like baby trees,
so I don't mind seeing the baby trees in a clear cut.
If I know that it's been done properly at the right time,
and the right circumstances,
there are lots of baby trees out there,
and in addition to all those baby trees,
there's a whole new suite of wildlife species
that are gonna utilize that area.
And a whole new suite again as it begins to grow up,
and it matures, a whole new suite of wildlife again.
It's an interesting cycle over the long term.
But many people, if this is in their backyard,
they tend not to like it so much.
And the change in visual quality is important,
and that is a downside to clearcutting,
but so is a tornado and so is a wildifire.
And so these things are part of our lives.
shelterwooding is, to a certain degree,
sort of a modified clear cut,
but we don't take the trees out all at once,
we take them out in two or three successive waves,
and the whole idea is to help that forest
establish regeneration, if it's not there already,
and then nurse that regeneration to a sapling size,
or larger.
Which usually is best done under partial light
for these kinds of tree species and forest types.
And then once a new forest is established,
we have the option of going in and removing
the remainder of trees, and sometimes we'll do that,
and sometimes we don't do that.
Of course the trees that remain
need some special conditions, too.
They need to be wind firm,
and to be able to withstand certain kinds of pressures,
or else they blow down or break,
or crack up, or suffer from ice or other things,
so it can't be done with all tree species,
but it can be done with some of our forest types.
Now this is everybody's perennial favorite,
and it's probably the most misunderstood
silvicultural system that we have, the selection system.
That's where we only go and take a few trees out,
the visual quality changes are minimal,
we can suffer through
the timber products extraction,
and we still have our nice forest left behind.
Unfortunately you can select the wrong trees
just as easily as you can select the right trees.
And so knowing which trees to cut,
harvest and thin out is important.
Because many times, on our private lands especially,
somebody will come and do a select cut ,
and the forest that you have left over
is not exactly what you had been hoping for.
So there is some skill that goes in with this system,
more than the other two systems.
And no two foresters will agree
on the exact same set of trees to harvest
under this kind of system,
and it's very malleable and flexible in terms of
other considerations in the forest,
such as wildlife habitat, or soil and water protection,
or quality timber production.
On the far end of that, the extreme end of that,
is a crop tree idea.
This is popular among hunters that like to grow oak trees
for the acorns to drop to feed the deer.
On the top frame, on the right hand side,
the green trees with the CTs,
those are the crop trees.
In this case, in this example,
say oak trees, we'll remove most of the trees
around those crop trees,
to give those trees more light, more photosynthate,
more rapid growth, healthier trees in that area.
So we can use that concept to grow acorns,
or veneer, or fruit, or other things
that might be of interest to a landowner.
This is a quick way, a quick and dirty way,
to compare these two extreme systems
of clearcutting and selection system.
No one system is actually better than the other one,
if they're applied in the right situation,
and both of them are damaging forest practices
when they're applied in the wrong forest type,
or the wrong situation.
So the selection system, for example,
in an aspen stand is one fast way to degrade
your aspen stand and prevent it from regenerating.
It just doesn't work.
And so, there's a few items
to compare in there.
A few notes on intermediate treatments.
These are the things that don't fit
quite perfectly well in a silvicultural system,
but are sometimes needed in a forest
for one purpose or another.
Not gonna talk about all of these,
but I am gonna focus a little bit
about timber stand improvement,
or now it's often just called stand improvement,
'cause foresters are be getting politcally correct,
and we drop the word "timber."
Even though we really mean timber,
we're talking about stand improvement,
but actually stand improvement can be
for other resources and values as well.
But whatever those resources and values are,
some of the trees can be removed,
sometimes on a commercial-,
sometimes on a pre-commercial-basis,
if the landowner wishes to do so.
And after the timber stand improvement,
we have a better looking stand,
and a stand that has more attributes,
according to the landowner.
And again, planting.
We usually only think about sticking
the trees in the ground,
but that's the short part of the long window.
In urban forestry, we often say,
it's a whole lot better to put a 10 dollar tree
in a hundred dollar hole,
than a hundred dollar tree in a 10 dollar hole.
It's all about the site preparation.
If you don't prepare your site,
and if you don't follow up with the competing vegetation,
you're going to suffer what nature has in store
for those trees, which is high mortality rates.
Nature is out to kill us.
And if you don't think so,
just talk to a microbiologist someday,
or read Dan Riskin's book, by the way.
He wrote a book called "Nature is Trying to Kill You."
It's humorous, but it's very science-based,
and it kinda flouts some of the common popular
views of nature, and what is quote-unquote, natural .
Natural is not always a good thing.
But anyway, artificial regeneration is used,
planting is sometimes used,
when, for one reason or another,
natural regeneration fails,
or we want to convert the site to another forest type
that might not be there right now.
Such as aspen to red pine.
Might be an example.
We also manage forests for protection.
So we look at a landscape.
There's a lot of things out there trying to damage forests.
Biological, abiological,
human-induced climate change.
Other things are out there that are
putting pressures on our forests.
Now there are diseases, both native and exotic.
There are insects, both native and exotic.
And then there's, the fun one, which is fire.
Everybody loves a good fire. It always makes the news.
So, I'm gonna talk about one fire that occurred in Michigan,
'cause it's one of the largest in the upper lake states
in many years, it was over 20,000 acres.
It was a lightening fire.
The only thing that stopped it was Lake Superior.
So it was pretty interesting.
Fast-moving, jack pine, mature trees, crown fire,
very dangerous, burned up lots of buildings.
Fortunately it was in a part of the U.P.
where there wasn't a whole lot of buildings,
or a whole lot of people.
Otherwise it could have been disastrous.
Few photos from that, there's Lake Superior
with a smoke plume coming off that,
early in the fire,
and then later on in the fire as it grew.
And here's what it looked like in one of the fingers
that came off that fire.
And if we were unfortunate enough to be on the ground,
this is where you turn around and run.
And this is when it's too late to run.
These are all fires from the Duck Lake,
it burned for several days.
Well, overnight and then another day.
And we had a lot of equipment working on that.
We drew it from many different places
to put out the fire.
Here's the aftermath.
This is what nature is trying to do.
This is nature's way to do a clear cut, for example.
And this was a pretty hot and dangerous fire.
It didn't leave much behind.
It looks disastrous, but you go back to this area today
and there's a lot of things growing in there.
Jack pine regenerates fairly well after the fire.
Their regeneration did return.
Again, natural isn't always better.
Even though it does occur.
Few other threats.
So there have been some large fires in northern Wisconsin,
but our lake states fire control efforts
have been largely successful.
We wield the fires down to, usually,
double digit fires from million-acre-plus fires
we had 100 years ago, 150 years ago
was very devastating.
But there are more forest threats out there
that I think are more important than insects
or diseases, or fire.
Although those are the ones that get the headlines.
There's these exotic species,
some of which are game-changers in forest ecology.
Real serious issue.
Deer depredation.
Them are fightin' words in a lot of places
in northern Wisconsin and the U.P.
I've said this in front of a group of loggers before,
or not a group of loggers, a group of hunters before,
and if looks could kill, I would have been dead
dozens of times over.
'Cause there are different ways to look at deer,
but one way is their impact in the landscape
on forest regeneration, of the understory, the shrub layer,
and young trees.
And the impacts are indisputable.
They're severe in many parts of Wisconsin, and the U.P.
and the northern lower part of Michigan.
Not so sure there's a whole lot we can do about it
politically, but it is something to be concerned about.
And then benign neglect is a term that I use
for many people who own forest land
who just don't want to do anything.
That's their right. That's their prerogative.
They can do that.
I would support them in doing that,
in expressing their right,
but I would also hope that I could change their mind,
and to manage that forest to get more of the stuff
that they might want out of their forest.
The fourth one there is a little counter-intuitive.
The loss of forest industry
is a threat to forests.
Forest industry provides the products that you and I use.
Our toilet paper, our coffee,
our telephone poles.
All the things that we use.
We use roughly four to six pounds of wood every single day.
Each one of us, on average, in the United States.
It needs to come from somewhere.
Industry provides that.
Now industry also provides a market
from the cut products from the forest.
Forest management happens because
it's a commercial enterprise.
People get paid.
Otherwise, these practices aren't going to happen.
There aren't too many landowners
that are going to spend much of their lives
removing and manipulating trees,
and doing different things at no cost.
Or at their own expense. It just won't happen.
So a vibrant forest industry
is key to a vibrant forest management set of choices,
and good forest health
across the lake states.
And the last one, urban sprawl and splatter,
I think most of us are familiar with,
urban sprawl, we're all familiar with.
Urban splatter is my term for what happens
in the Northwoods, when John Q. Public
retires from Milwaukee,
and buys a little piece of heaven in Minakawa,
and all of a sudden, you have Minocqua.
And so then, there's a lot of people
that are moving into these forested areas,
which is a nice thing if you're those people,
but also presents management challenges,
as the parcels get smaller and smaller,
and more and more people move in
that don't like the sound of machinery,
or the look of a logging truck,
or the saw mill that's down the road.
Forest threats. Some exotic species.
Three of them are here. There are more than this.
Upper left is our friend the emerald ash borer,
which I think most of the folks in Wisconsin
are now familiar with.
It came to the United States via Detroit Harbor.
First discovered and identified in 2002,
but it probably had been chewing its way through the forests
and been distributed by nurseries and firewood users
for at least 10 years prior to that.
On the right hand side is
the Asian Longhorn Beetle.
This is scary. That one is scary.
It's not here yet.
The nearest location is in southern Ohio.
There's more in Toronto, in Worcester, Mass.
It was eradicated, we're pretty sure in Chicago,
in parts of New Jersey, other states where it's popped up.
We do not want that here.
The lower, the center one, is Hemlock Woolly Adelgid.
It's not here yet, either,
but the lake states, the upper lake states,
has the last large reserves of eastern hemlock
on the continent.
The rest of them have been devastated
by this particular exotic species
of juice-sucker, essentially.
That's what an adelgid is, it's roughly
sort of like an aphid.
Although it's structure and life cycles
are a little bit different,
but the effect is largely the same.
But it's killed thousands and thousands of acres
of hemlock in the eastern states.
What we don't immediately think about as a "why" to manage
is a family resource.
Most of us can remember going to the woods as a kid.
Some of us still do it.
Some of us own land just for this reason.
It's a good way to draw together different generations.
They can work on the forest. They can play in the forest.
They can help harvest timber, thin trees, pull exotic species,
watch for this, that, or the other thing.
It's a great way to pull families together.
And considering an inheritance of that property
is also important.
Most of the private land in the lake states
are owned by old white guys, like me.
We're not gonna be on the planet forever,
and so if we're one to be prudent,
we're gonna think about how we're gonna pass
that land along to others,
and involve our heirs in the process
of how to do that, what to do,
and manage accordingly.
Get winding down here.
Health, maintenance and restoration
are other reasons to manage forests.
As things get messed up, in one way or another,
to a certain degree, they can be fixed, mitigated
or possibly turned around.
This, many people might argue, is a beautiful forest.
This is a highly dysfunctional forest.
This is a forest that's in real serious trouble.
It's beautiful, but,
ecologically, it's a mess.
There's no regeneration in here,
there's not likely to be any regeneration in here,
and it presents some major management challenges.
So one of the things I'd like to leave with you tonight is
visual quality really is a crappy way
to assess a forest condition.
It looks nice.
It appeals to our human senses,
but forests don't work that way.
They work with their own devices, and their own ecology.
So just 'cause it looks good,
or just because it looks bad,
doesn't necessarily mean it is good or is bad.
We need to know a little bit more about ecology.
Lastly, why manage a forest?
Habitat. Here's the big reason right there.
It's both a beautiful creature,
and it's a nemesis in the forest.
Full of contradictions, full of controversy,
difficult to decide what to do
from a public policy standpoint.
Do we manage for these kind of wildlife?
Probably not.
In the lake states, we've got roughly
600 species of vertebrates alone,
the majority of which depend on forests
for at least part of their life cycle.
Most of them we couldn't even name.
Try it some time at a party.
30 people or so?
Try to name a wildlife species without repeating one.
See if you can get through 30 people.
(laughs)
It's an interesting endeavor.
On my own property, I manage for wildlife,
but not necessarily for deer.
I burn regularly,
because I like some of these creatures
in these upland shrub grassy areas,
which has become an increasingly endangered habitat
as these areas are developed.
That's a crane. We have cranes on our property.
Which, when I was going to school,
cranes were unusual.
You didn't see them in the 1970s.
I mean, Aldo Leopold wrote an eulogy to the crane,
'cause he felt pretty sure they were gonna go extinct.
Well, they didn't.
And of course, on my property,
I have three peenting grounds for woodcock.
I taught my kids to enjoy peenting.
One of my daughters and I even got up,
in the wee hours of the morning in sleeping bags,
and slept on the edge of one waiting for the
male to come out, and he actually did the dance for her,
and she hasn't forgotten that.
And I also manage for harriers.
Because I manage for small mammals,
that brings in the harriers,
and I like harriers.
So there's a lot of reasons to manage.
This document, for those of you in Wisconsin,
is real helpful, it's Forest Management Guidelines.
There's a URL on there.
It's longer than it needs to be,
but if you just type in a browser,
Wisconsin Forest Management Guidelines,
this will pop up near the top.
And finally, if there are any questions,
I'm gonna leave this up here,
for just a moment or two,
or until they cut me off.
Here's some high points of
what I was talking about this evening.
So any questions? At this point?
Well, thank you very much.
(applause)
Have a good evening.