Study Finds Effects of Thinning Improve Old-Growth Forest Restoration

Thinning treatments helped restore old-growth forest conditions in a restoration project on the Flathead National Forest, according to a team of researchers from the University of Montana. The study, which was published recently in the Canadian Journal of Forest Research, is being called the most detailed analysis yet of restoration treatment effects on forest spatial patterns. Andrew Larson, a UM assistant professor of forest ecology and the lead author of the study, said monitoring results from the Meadow Smith old-growth restoration project show thinning treatments successfully restored spatial elements of old-growth forests. Larson and his co-authors, former UM graduate student Kyle Stover and UM associate research professor Chris Keyes, examined how thinning treatments changed tree patterns in the Southwestern Crown Collaborative (SWCC) project area, a 1.5 million acre area spanning the Blackfoot, Clearwater and Swan river valleys that encompasses portions of the Flathead, Helena and Lolo national forests. In a second analysis, they compared tree maps from restored forests to tree maps from historical old-growth forests to evaluate how effective the treatments were at restoring old-growth conditions...more