In 2015, the Willapa National Wildlife Refuge acquired a few hundred acres of young forest from a commercial timber company.
Forming a buffer near long-standing refuge property east of Long Beach, the acreage had been replanted less than a decade before at a density of about 400 trees per acre. But by the time the refuge began thinning them this past spring, natural regeneration had swelled that figure to 3,000 trees per acre in some stands. Navigating them on foot is like trying to push through a wall.
Without thinning, these trees would grow not just tall, spindly and unhealthy, but also vulnerable to wildfires. This latter scenario might seem unlikely out here on the coast, where historic fire-return intervals were long. But it’s far from impossible, especially as summers get hotter and drier and drought cycles longer and more frequent.
Not to mention the fact that when fire did return, it returned ferociously. As Kyle Smith, forest manager for The Nature Conservancy of Washington, puts it: “When we had a big fire on the west side, they just kind of burned everything. And … I think we’re seeing increased likelihoods on the west side that it could happen more frequently, which is scary.”
Complexity, diversity
As with pre-commercial thinning on timber plantations, the refuge’s overall objective has been to reduce stand density. But unlike timber companies, the refuge is following a Conservancy-designed prescription that not only takes extra steps to maximize fire resiliency, but also prioritizes complexity and diversity over timber volume.
For instance, instead of just falling and bucking trees, the refuge is grinding them on the spot with heavy machinery. The reasoning behind this is twofold. First, wood chips and mulch return nutrients to the forest quicker than slash. Second, from a fuels-management perspective, fine fuels pose less risk than heavy fuels, which not only burn more intensely but can also stack up higher on the forest floor.
Additionally, the Conservancy’s prescription leaves trees in discontinuous clumps instead of spacing them evenly. This distribution, which Smith calls “skips and gaps,” aims to mimic the structure of old, mature forests, in which natural disturbances like wind storms level trees randomly and complex understories develop in the resulting mosaic of clearings. Solitary spruce and cedar saplings, on the other hand, are being left wherever they’re found, lest they be out-competed by the fast-growing hemlock.
Shaun Matthews has run equipment at the refuge for the past two decades and worked in the woods since the ’80s. Even with his experience, the selectivity of this prescription still poses a challenge: “The spruce and the cedar … are not growing very well here. Because they’re slower-growing, they’re all covered up.”
So covered up, in fact, that it can be hard enough to spot them even from the cab of an excavator, let alone masticate precisely around them; imagine mowing an overgrown lawn and trying to leave the dandelions behind.
Left: A clump of young hemlocks stands in a newly thinned patch at the Willapa National Wildlife Refuge on May 14, 2024. The thinning prescriptions leaves “skips and gaps” in the trees to mimic the clearings created by natural disturbances. Right: An excavator with mulching head attached masticates trees during a thinning operation at the Willapa National Wildlife Refuge on June 13, 2024. (Riley Yuan/Chinook Observer)
Naturalizing is costly
Nothing about this work is quick, easy or inexpensive. But it is necessary, as Todd Rankin, fuels specialist for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Pacific region, explains: “We have to nurture these forests back into that natural existence, and we just can’t expect to just be hands-off and think that it’s going to be successful.”
Furthermore, these treatments aren’t just an investment into the forest itself. They’re also an investment in the local economy. In addition to restoring the forest, the Conservancy is also trying to make its operations both financially self-sustaining and a consistent source of jobs. It’s a big ask, especially considering that the Conservancy faces the same prohibitive log markets as commercial timber companies while operating on even thinner margins. Funding bottlenecks are still common, and this most recent round of thinning relied largely on federal money allocated through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law that was passed and signed into law in 2021.
But it’s not impossible to break even either, as past experience on the neighboring Ellsworth Creek Preserve shows.
“It’s all self-sustaining,” says Smith. “We are relying on grants, but a lot of it is through the timber revenue, where we’re thinning some of these older forests that generate revenue in a way to cover other costs, like these younger-stand thinnings that we’re doing at the refuge.”
Ecological gains
Even the ecological returns are starting to become measurable, though the full extent of them will take decades to materialize. Restoration treatments on the Ellsworth Creek Preserve are already showing a positive impact on key old-growth metrics, including tree size, vertical and horizontal complexity, stand density and understory richness, less than two decades after they were first implemented.
As for the refuge, just a few minutes from where the machines have been working, Smith points out an older stand that was hand-thinned in 2011. There are still the same skips and gaps, the same clumps of hemlocks. Only now, instead of mulch, a vibrant understory fills the intervening clearings. Here and there, solitary cedars and spruce are growing stout, their canopies spreading into the space they were given. There are even some snags bearing the girdles that made them.
At one point, Smith walks past a moss-covered mound and pauses. “We cut that,” he says. It isn’t a mound. It’s a stump. It’s so overgrown as to be nearly invisible. It looks so much older than it is. It looks like a sign of what’s to come.
The Chinook Observer originally published this article on June 24, 2024.