Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
as windthrow. Responses to date have shown increased forage for more than twenty
years following such treatments (Alaback 2010).
Ecological Restoration as the Zone of Agreement
As Kim and Hjerpe (chap. 14, this volume) argue, pressing social or economic im-
pacts of degraded landscapes often drive landscape-scale restoration projects, such as
water availability in the Everglades or unnatural and catastrophic wildfire threatening
human communities in the American Southwest. Many areas of the Tongass clearly
suffer from degraded streams and wildlife habitat, but impacts to human resources,
such as drinking water, have been minimal and dispersed. Detrimental effects to local
deer populations from dense, second-growth forest are a growing concern and, ulti-
mately, will affect subsistence living, hunting, and, perhaps, wolf populations, but to
date the effects are highly localized (Porter 2007). In the absence of wildfire, which is
the immediate community threat that often creates a sense of urgency in other west-
ern states, the focus on ecological restoration on the Tongass may be surprising.
The critical need for restoration on the Tongass addresses more than just ecologi-
cal degradation. It flows from the need to establish more beneficial ways of managing
the landscape and natural resources that meet the social, economic, and ecological
needs of multiple stakeholders. The increasingly unpalatable practice of old-growth
timber harvest, combined with a rapidly diminishing supply of economically har-
vestable timber due to years of unsustainable high-grading and poor markets, assure a
tenuous future for logging as usual. Furthermore, the rapid depletion of old-growth
timber is putting long-term ecosystem services at risk for generations to come. Chang-
ing economic and demographic conditions in southeast Alaska are providing the im-
petus for developing a new model of doing business on the Tongass. Ecological resto-
ration is emerging as the zone of agreement that brings both timber and nontimber
values into account.
Example Projects
To better understand the management changes already taking place on the Tongass, it
is useful to look at several example projects. Three restoration projects—Starrigavan,
Sal Creek, and Harris River—demonstrate the types of restoration treatments, ecolog-
ical need, unique partnerships, and local economic opportunities afforded and cre-
ated by restoration (fig. 9.1).
Starrigavan
The Starrigavan River watershed, in the northern Tongass near Sitka, was logged in
the early 1970s. Hundreds of acres of dense, second-growth stands are currently in the
stem exclusion stage, with little light penetration and poor vegetation. Identified as
a high-priority restoration site by multiple partners, the U.S. Forest Service, Sitka
Conservation Society, Trout Unlimited, and other partners initiated an integrated
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