Redwoods  can host an entire food web in their crowns with plants, small animals, and more. These biodiversity hotspots are exclusively found in primary or old-growth forests in the wettest part of the redwood range. Two Cal Poly Humboldt faculty are on a mission to restore canopy ecosystems in regenerating or secondary redwood forest. A keystone species in the redwood canopy is Polypodium scouleri, or leather-leaf fern. These ferns, along with the decomposed organic matter that makes up the soil in which they grow, form fern mats. Mats can grow to be 8 feet wide and hold nearly 5,000 gallons of water per acre each year. This ability to collect and hold water may be key to redwood canopy biodiversity success and survival in a warming and drying climate. Cal Poly Humboldt Professor Stephen Sillett and Marie Antoine have embarked on a project that could help re-establish fern mats in redwood canopies.

Randy Schillinger

PORTLAND, Oregon —A controversial Habitat Conservation Plan (HCP) for State Forests that will reduce timber harvests by 34 percent and result in billions of dollars of lost revenue for the next 70 years has been narrowly approved by a divided Board of Forestry. The agency and the Board realized back in January 2023 that the draft HCP would drastically reduce harvest levels and fail to meet the agency’s own objectives. …“No alternatives were ever explored,” said Randy Schillinger, CEO of Hampton Lumber. “There was no reflection, no amendment, no compromise and no consideration for communities and jobs.” …“A few will celebrate passage of this HCP, but anything that excludes and harms this many people is not a win for Oregon,” said Schillinger. …”The amount of forestland arbitrarily set aside in “no touch” zones by ODF is too excessive and has not been well explained or defended. 

A Webinar Series by the National Council for Air and Stream Improvement and the Washington Chapter of The Wildlife Society.

Wildfires and fire seasons are commonly cast as good or bad based largely on the simple metric of area burned (more acres = bad). A seemingly paradoxical narrative frames large fire seasons as a symptom of a forest health problem, while simultaneously stating that fire-dependent forests lack sufficient fire to maintain system resilience. One key to resolving this paradox is placing contemporary fire years in the context of historical fire regimes. Historical regimes can also inform forest restoration efforts by illuminating how much fire area historically maintained (i.e., ‘treated’) fire-resilient landscapes. …Contrary to the common narrative of unprecedented or too-much fire in our dry forest landscapes today, modern fire years are only burning a small fraction of a typical historical year when hundreds of thousands of acres are burned annually on average.

Congress has given the president the power to create national monuments on public lands. Those monuments are overseen by the Department of the Interior. But Congress has also charged the agency with managing a wide array of other public lands, sometimes for purposes of development instead of preservation. This week,we highlight petitions that ask the court to consider whether Barack Obama had the authority to expand a national monument in the forests of Oregon into land overseen by the Interior Department. At issue in this case are two separate laws. The first law, the Antiquities Act of 1906, gives the president the power to designate areas of land as national monuments and protect them from development. …In the second law, Congress directed the Interior Department to enforce sustainable harvesting of timber in a broad swath of federally owned forest in Oregon, with instructions to ensure both a “permanent forest” and an economic benefit to residents.