Old growth forest experiment in Willapa Hills

Perched on a dirt road between stands of densely packed hemlocks and cedars, Tom Kollasch points to one of the parcels he plans to have commercially thinned. "We're just waiting for timber prices to go back up," he says.

Nothing unusual here. He's certainly not the only person in Pacific County with timber harvesting interests.

Except Kollasch is an environmentalist.

He works for The Nature Conservancy. He manages operations on a property called the Ellsworth Creek Preserve.

As part of their wide-ranging forest restoration efforts, Kollasch and his Ellsworth Creek team are conducting an experiment on this 8,000-acre preserve in the Willapa Hills.

At Ellsworth Creek, scientists and foresters are testing the theory that perhaps just leaving a forest alone passive management, as Willapa forester Bill Lecture calls it isn't enough to undo the alterations caused by decades of logging.

Rather, they believe the best way to return a forest to its original, old-growth state may be by using a more calculated form of logging. They believe it's necessary to thin out cramped stands of hemlocks or replanted Douglas firs to create a more balanced mix of species that resembles what an old-growth forest looks like.

The project's findings may provide the model for a new type of forest management one that blends both economic and ecological interests.

Lecture envisions a model for landowners who want to restore forests, but who also want to generate income through harvesting timber in the process.

About 300 acres of old-growth forest remain within the Ellsworth Creek Preserve. Its jagged canopy can be seen peeking out above the thinner, younger conifers that blanket most of the property.

This unlogged swath includes 1,000-year-old cedars, 500-year-old spruce and 200-year-old hemlocks. The forest provides habitat for wildlife, including the marbled murrelet, a threatened seabird that nests on the large branches of cedars.

It was this old growth section that first attracted The Nature Conservancy, a nonprofit environmental group. But rather than only purchasing those 300 acres, the group decided to buy the entire watershed. While similar forest-thinning operations are going on elsewhere in the Northwest, few have so much terrain to work with.

"What's unique about Ellsworth is that we're experimenting at a rather large scale," Kollasch said.

Surrounding the preserve's pocket of old-growth forest are nearly 7,500 acres that were logged by landowners before the Conservancy bought the land.

The logging practice of clear-cutting diverse forests and replanting the land with one dominant, lucrative species, Lecture says, has created forests cramped with weaker trees that don't provide proper wildlife habitat.

These younger trees are growing close together, at an average of 1,500 trees per acre. An ideal old-growth forest has about 60 to 100 trees per acre.

When trees are packed too close together, Lecture said, they don't have the space to grow strong.

The Conservancy plans to selectively thin portions of the preserve while leaving other sections alone to serve as a "control."

After 10 years, they will begin to compare the thinned sections with the areas that were left alone.

The idea is to create a more diverse mix of species and allow for more space between trees.

Private forest landowners may like the idea of restoration, but few could afford to forfeit potential timber income.

Kollasch and Lecture understand this.

"No landowner will follow this example if all we did is pour privately funded dollars into it," Kollasch said.

That's why the Conservancy is making sure the Ellsworth Creek project pays for itself. The group has 575 acres marked for thinning. Further commercial thinning also is planned.

Lecture said the money made from those operations will help pay for various habitat enhancement projects on the preserve, such as decommissioning old roads.

Lecture, who was operations manager for the Clatsop State Forest in Oregon for more than 30 years, was intrigued enough by the Ellsworth Creek project that he came out of retirement to work on it.

In the past, he said, there have basically been two approaches to forest management. On one side is the profit-driven commercial logging approach. On the other is the "leave-it-alone" approach.

"It's kind of a polarizing view of forestry," Lecture said. "We're trying to find some middle ground."

The group isn't trying to change commercial logging laws.

"We're not here to legislate new forest practice rules," Kollasch said.

They also recognize that some environmental groups will still prefer to leave forest untouched, even if it has already been altered by logging.

"It's a romantic notion to think if you just leave it alone it will return to its original condition," Lecture said.

But they hope to provide a model for those who fall somewhere in the middle.

In the future, Lecture sees small woodland owners taking several hundred acres and thinning them about every 20 years.

"You have to convince them that not only is it a good idea ecologically, but it's also a good idea economically," he said.

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Information from: The Daily News, http://www.tdn.com