Restoring the forest: putting the woods back the way it was is expensive and the species are ever-changing. In many cases, though, it's worth it. Read on.

A snag," exclaims Melissa Savage, looking up at the dead tree woodpeckers had started to excavate. "How fantastic!" I'm in northern New Mexico trying to follow her through the bosque, a scrubby forest along the Rio Grande flood plain.

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Savage, a former geography professor turned restoration ecologist, is helping the San Juan Pueblo restore their watershed forests. Thousands more acres across the Southwest will be "restored" under the Healthy Forests Restoration Act signed by President Bush on Dec. 3, 2003. But what does forest restoration really mean?

"Floods used to bring seed of native plants down from upstream," Savage explains, heading into a knot of Russian olive trees, "but we have channeled the river." Invasive species now bully out the natives--a few ancient cottonwoods stand clumped together in a thicket of Russian olives; a few willows huddle in a swath of tamarisk.

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"Restoration is complicated work," Savage adds. "We can take out the exotic species, but we have to do so slowly because some birds have adapted to them. We can reintroduce floods, but only in a controlled way to protect development in the area.

Restoration is such a new and site-specific process that it must be constantly adjusted through regular monitoring. Savage makes a point of meeting frequently with researchers and community members to determine if the project is meeting multiple goals such as improved diversity and aesthetics.

She hopes to develop a place the Pueblo people will appreciate and use, a place the elders will say looks like what they remember.

Restoration "attempts to return a degraded, damaged or destroyed ecosystem to its historic trajectory of development determined from reference historical or intact ecosystems," according to the Society of Ecological Restoration

Restoration occurs both at the surface and beneath it, restoring vegetative composition and structure--such as large ponderosa pine spaced far apart--and the processes--such as fire--that maintain that vegetation.

The job seems simple but is complicated by a world that has been so affected by humans that ecologists don't know what "natural" really is. Ecologist Daniel Botkin says the aim of restoration should be to bring a system within its natural ranges of variability.

"When you restore a painting you put it back in its original state," Botkin wrote in Discordant Harmonies. "But [nature is dynamic] and has no natural state."

Besides these practical difficulties, restoration is contentious. Philosopher Robert Elliot, for example, warns that restoration is just "faking nature," replacing the genuine article with a knock-off that will be used to justify continued environmental exploitation. Other philosophers offer degrees of restoration: malevolent (creating an artificial wetland to enable development), neutral (repairing existing manmade structures like roads or trails), and benevolent (restoring forests and other natural systems affected by extinctions, exotic species, global warming, habitat fragmentation, and fire suppression).

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Benevolent restoration examples from New Mexico, Arizona, and Vermont show how complicated this well-intentioned work can be.

RETURNING FIRE

Los Alamos, New Mexico, shows the significance of forest restoration, both in guarding against big fires and in recovering afterwards. In the summer of 2000 the Cerro Grande fire burned more than 42,000 acres of ponderosa pine forest and destroyed more than 100 homes. In the hills above Los Alamos, burnt trees stand upright like pins in a cushion; it will be decades before the land fills in with green trees again.

All along the Rocky Mountains, ponderosa pine forests have changed, priming them for these big fires. Overgrazing in the late 1800s took many of the grasses that fires used to run through, high-grade logging removed the thick-barked trees that could resist fire, and firefighters snuffed out the ground fires that used to run through these forests every five to 25 years. As a result, tree densities have ballooned 50-fold in many places in the Southwest over the last century.

Researchers have developed many approaches to manage these dense forests. One commonly used presettlement structure, or remnant approach, involves finding either old stumps or ponderosa pines that are more than 100 years old and preserving one to three high-quality trees around each to emulate clumps. Then, the other trees between the clumps, primarily smaller and shade-tolerant ones, are cut out. Surface fires then are lit to kill off saplings, reduce fuel loads, enrich the soil with nutrients, and bring fire back to the forest.

"There's nothing magic about presettlement time," says Wallace Covington of Northern Arizona University, who developed the remnant restoration treatment. "It is simply the best and most recent evidence we have on the past 10,000 years. Relic stands of ponderosa pine in Mexico with uninterrupted fire regimes show the same evidence."

Of course, the more sources that are used for forest history--such as needle types in fossilized pack rat middens and fire scar frequency in old stumps--the more accurate it becomes. Also, at least some evidence should be gathered from different points in time--many of the changes over the last 150 years of settlement in the West, for example, coincide with dramatic increases in temperature at the end of the Little Ice Age.

The remnant approach is widely used because it's simple and involves just one entry into the forest. Reintroducing frequent fires can mimic natural, lightning-caused fire, boost plant populations and wildlife forage, and reduce severe fire hazard. But the treatment is expensive (primarily low-value trees are removed) and controversial.

A number of ecologists including UCLA's Savage and USGS's Allen suggest focusing restoration harvests on smaller trees to maintain scarce old-growth trees and also reducing road building and fuel loads around houses first to reduce fire hazard.

DEVELOPING OLD-GROWTH HABITAT

You can see golden-barked ponderosa pine forests from old photos and you can measure erosion rates over the last decade in pinyon-juniper woodlands, but how do you find a reference for an old-growth hardwood forest in the Northeast?

More than 90 percent of Vermont was forested in the early 1700s, and nearly that amount is forested today, but in between, before timbering and farming shifted West, two-thirds of the forest was denuded by settlers cutting wood for houses and clearing land for fields and pastures. These regrown forests are different from their ancestors.

For example, ecologist David Foster has shown that a 300-year-old hemlock forest in Massachusetts frequently used as an ancient forest analogue actually had an earlier composition of northern hardwoods and white pine that was probably cut out by farmers for building and fuel, leaving behind the less-valuable hemlock.

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"New England is a cultural landscape," Foster wrote in Thoreau's Country. "Nearly every acre of the countryside has been grazed by cattle, tilled for crops, or cut for fuelwood."

The current 50- to 100-year-old New England forests are different not only in composition but in structure from the primeval forests. The dominant disturbances in the region--small-scale wind and ice storms, with an occasional 100-year hurricane--left a heterogeneous forest with a variety of tree ages and types, making more than 90 percent of New England an old-growth forest, according to ecologists Craig Lorimer and Charlie Cogbill.

"If we can learn how to accelerate old-growth-type structure in some of these younger forests, we could foster a broader array of biodiversity and boost ecosystem functions like carbon storage to offset global warming," says forest ecologist William Keeton of the University of Vermont.

Keeton also focuses his restoration work on structure rather than species because the species composition of the Northern Forest keeps changing.

"Chestnut was killed off by blight," Keeton says. "Large beech are declining from beech bark disease, hemlock wooly adelgid is moving north, and Asian longhorned beetle could soon hit maple. Spruce at high elevations and maple on poor sites are losing vigor from soil calcium depletion from acid rain. Climate change might compound all of these problems.

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"So what kind of forest will we have here in the future?" he adds. "Should we be restoring forest characteristics that existed in the past if the forests are heading toward something very different in the future?"

Keeton focuses on forest structure rather than species assemblages because of these imminent changes and also because structure controls many ecological functions. I joined him on a walk with his students to see research plots on Mt. Mansfield--the tallest mountain in Vermont, a lump with a craggy top.

Keeton is trying something novel: He wants to make a structurally complex forest out of a lanky juvenile stand of beech, yellow birch, and sugar maple. His experiment mimics what natural disturbances would do over a couple hundred years.

Keeton takes out deteriorating small- and medium-sized trees to reallocate growing space to the biggest, healthiest trees; releases vigorous young trees in the understory as layering for wildlife; leaves some large tree debris on the forest floor to add organic matter to the soil and provide habitat for salamanders; girdles some trees to create snags for woodpeckers, bats and cavity-nesting songbirds; and pulls over some trees to create depressions where spring rains can form pools and mounds of fresh soil where herbacious vegetation can germinate.

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Over the next two years, Keeton will have complete data on the ecological and economic impacts of these treatments. That, he hopes, will show whether ecological restoration can be combined with economic timber harvesting for private and public land.

RESTORE OR LEAVE ALONE?

So is restoration worth the expense and effort? Forest restoration can often cost anywhere between $200 and $2,000 per acre, but this investment might be worth the cost to protect homes from wildfire, preserve archeological artifacts from erosion, or to save valuable timber.

Also, researchers constantly struggle with a clear reference, but in certain regions they have been able to develop a historical range of variability, as Botkin suggested, from photos, written records, preserved areas, fire scars, pack rat middens, lake bed pollen, and other sources. Restoration, then, can be justified where there is a base datum of normality, as Aldo Leopold wrote, and where there are human benefits in preserving homes, timber, and artifacts or improving ecological services.

Improved ecological services have come from restoration in the invaded bosque forests, combustible ponderosa pine forests, and adolescent hardwood forests. These include reducing fire frequency and erosion; increasing flood control, biodiversity and carbon storage; and improving aesthetics and recreation opportunities from hunting to hiking.

Some of these ecological services are becoming marketable. In the late 1980s, for example, changes in Environmental Protection Agency regulations required New York City to either install a water filtration system for more than $5 billion or conserve and maintain forested watersheds in the Catskills, a more natural solution that would cost less than $1 billion (see "Natural Capital," page 26). City administrators chose the latter.

In California, the Sierra Nevada Ecosystem Project (SNEP) found water from the Sierra Nevada Mountains provides more than $1.5 billion worth of hydroelectric generation and municipal and agricultural use. In such watersheds, restoration that prevents severe fire and erosion is a bargain.

LEARN MORE:

AMERICAN FORESTS' Ecosystem Restoration and Maintenance Agenda focuses on assisting communities in planning and implementing tree and forest actions to restore and maintain healthy ecosystems and communities. Our goals include:

* Providing tools and resources to help build the capacity of communities to assess ecological issues related to trees and forests, and to plan and implement actions. Technical tools, information and financial assistance are essential.

* Increasing public and private investment in tree and forest actions to restore and maintain healthy ecosystems and communities. Planning must be done at a large enough scale to consider the ecological linkages between urban and rural communities, especially along watersheds.

* Heightening public awareness of the interdependence between ecosystems and communities through accessible research information, inclusive policy dialogue, and communication. Restoration strategies must focus on maintaining the capacity of ecosystems to provide ecological services for all dependent species, both human and non-human.

* For more on AMERICAN FORESTS' Ecosystem Maintenance and Restoration Agenda, visit our website: www.americanforests.org/resources/fp/policygoals.php.

Story and photos by Bryan Foster

Wild Logging author Bryan Foster is a Ph.D. candidate in forestry at the University of Vermont.