After a forest is damaged by storms, communities will often "clean them up". They'll move the dead trees, make a salvage sale of the wood and get rid of all the debris. But where did we get the idea that this was any good for the forest? An article in Science Daily, named "Doing Nothing Might Be Best Management Decision for Forests Destroyed by Wind or Ice," challenges this. It presents the fact that much of a salvaged forest's original growth and biodiversity is stripped away, leaving a rather bare environment that's harder to restore to the original state. It also tells the results of a twenty-year study at the Harvard Forest Long Term Ecological Research Site, in Massachusetts. Researchers simulated the effects of a hurricane by flattening trees in a two-acre area of mature oak forest. The trees died in a few years, but after some time, new and surviving trees sprouted up and thrived among the dead wood. These species were diverse. Weedy plants that tried to colonize the area didn't survive for long. And in another forest, where salvage was limited, native vegetation recovered quickly, and the dead matter of the area was useful for native animals' natural behaviors.
I think this is definitely true. The dead and decaying matter of a forest is definitely useful to the decomposers or detritivores who would live off of it, then enriching the soil. These dead trees also provide places to live for many animals, and places to find food for the animals who prey on them. Forests thrived for millions of years without human interference, and as independent ecosystems can recover by themselves. As David Foster, director of the NSF Harvard Forest LTER site says, "Leaving a damaged forest intact means the original conditions recover more readily... Forests have been recovering from natural processes like windstorms, fire and ice for millions of years. What appears to us as devastation is actually, to a forest, a natural and important state of affairs."
When humans begin exploiting the environment for their own purposes, whether they're economic, aesthetic, or simply for safety reasons, the balance and routine recovery processes of nature are disrupted, and the ecosystem takes longer to recover because the key elements of its recovery have been taken away.We can worry about pedestrians, but that's about it. We don't need to baby these ecosystems, they do fine on their own. To assume that we know better how to correct the environment than the environment itself, with its millions of years worth of evolutionary adaptations, is ignorant. We should worry about our own problems, and trust nature to be better at governing itself than we are.
While a range of economic, public safety and aesthetic reasons seems to compel landowners to salvage storm-damaged trees, paper co-author Audrey Barker-Plotkin of the Harvard Forest site suggests that improving forest health should not be one of them.
"Although a blown-down forest appears chaotic," she says, "it is functioning as a forest and doesn't need us to clean it up."
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/10/121017124103.htm
I found the topic of the article interesting. I had known that forest fires can be good for a forest ecosystem, but I hadn't thought about the fact that downed trees and dead vegetation. I agree with the opinion of you and the article's author; that the ecosystem should take care of the damage itself, because many plants thrive off of the decomposing material. Storms are natural happenings, and damaged forests shouldn’t be “cleaned up” because there are a couple downed trees.
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