Green Diamond Announces 50-year Forest Habitat Conservation Plan
Press release from Green Diamond:
Green Diamond Resource Company officials, in concert with officials from the US Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) and the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, [yesterday] announced approval of a 50-year Forest Habitat Conservation Plan (FHCP) for management of over 350,000 acres of Green Diamond’s California working forest lands. The Forest HCP provides enhanced protection for the northern spotted owl, Pacific fisher, and red and Sonoma tree voles under the federal Endangered Species Act, and it is consistent with requirements for protection of the northern spotted owl under the California Endangered Species Act.
In 1992, Green Diamond’s predecessor, Simpson Timber Company, signed the first-ever Habitat Conservation Plan on private timberlands, protecting the northern spotted owl. “The Forest HCP is built on over 25 years of applied research and active owl management under the 1992 northern spotted owl HCP to improve our understanding of how to manage our private forest land for the needs of sensitive species while producing wood products for a growing population,” said Jason Carlson, Green Diamond vice president and general manager. “We are pleased to renew and continue this long-term conservation agreement between Green Diamond and its agency partners,” he added. Green Diamond conservation planning manager, Keith Hamm, further announced dedication of the plan to Dr. Lowell Diller. Dr. Diller a renowned owl scientist who worked at Green Diamond for many years, crafted the conservation program of the original spotted owl HCP and the new Forest HCP. Diller passed away in 2017.
The Forest HCP provides for retention and long-term growth of older forest stands on over 25 percent of Green Diamond’s timberlands, alongside a mosaic of younger forest stands. The Green Diamond plan will also retain additional wildlife trees, snags, and large-down wood components that are key habitat elements for fisher, owls, voles and other species.
Paul Souza, Regional Director, Pacific Southwest Region of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said: “Leadership from land stewards like Green Diamond is the foundation of conservation. This 50-year plan is a testament to our conservation partnership. It demonstrates the clear connection between the health of our environment and economy. They are one and the same. We are proud partners in this effort and look forward to the conservation successes that we will achieve together over the next half century.”“This is Green Diamond’s second long-term conservation plan for northern spotted owl and is informed by almost 30 years of scientific research and data from their first habitat conservation plan for timber lands on the north coast of California,” said Tina Bartlett, regional manager for CDFW’s Northern Region. “The Green Diamond Forest HCP demonstrates protecting endangered species and conserving their habitat can be accomplished hand in hand with sustainable timber harvest. It provides for 50 years of additional research and data collection informing adaptive management decisions.”
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🕯🌳Thank you Kym for that information. Some of your crowd won’t like it.
I’d like to see that plan and go over it with a fine tooth comb with educated and detail oriented forest Restoration scientists.
What are they getting for this. Lots of money and lots of exceptions I am willing to bet.
“alongside a mosaic of younger forest stands” … you mean all the clearcuts at different regrowth states.. and since they say they are conserving on just 25% of their 350k acres that means 75% -262k acres- are being clearcut.. sounds about right. gotta leave that 25% so they have something to clearcut in the future. this is such a load of PROPAGANDA and total bullshit. if they cared at all they would simply change their logging practices and STOP CLEARCUTTING
First, clearcutting in itself isn’t good or bad. It’s an established silvicultural technique that can either be used correctly or not. The same is true of the various forms of selection harvesting. From a silvicultural perspective it’s entirely appropriate to use the technique to regenerate species that require a lot of sunlight to grow from seedlings. Some species simply can’t be effectively regenerated without clearcuts or other large-scale disturbances like fire. Other species don’t require the technique but can do just fine with it (e.g. Douglas-fir) and it often simplifies other management techniques when you are trying to grow trees quickly for an economic purpose. It can be over-used and hence, detrimental, and often was in the past (50’s-80’s) but current sustainable forest practices are designed to minimize these negative impacts.
Early in our history of exploiting forests (i.e. before the advent of modern forestry in the US) we only did selection harvests where the selection criteria was to cut the very best and leave the rest. There’s a large legacy of that early selection cutting all over the northern California region that occurred in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s. The other name we apply to this was high-grading and it was highly detrimental to the ecosystems because of repeated entry and disturbance and negative impacts on forest genetics (you kept taking the best-adapted and leaving the poorest).
Clearcutting has environmental benefits as well as costs. The obvious costs are the loss of late-seral stage forest conditions and habitat for wildlife species dependent on them. The benefits are production of early-seral stage forest conditions which benefits a different group of wildlife species including many of the songbirds. It also has the additional benefit of reducing the road network and disturbance interval. This has to be balanced against a decrease in age-structure diversity and the obvious loss of aesthetic values.
Most companies, including Green Diamond, that continue to use even-aged management don’t use the true clearcut very much. Instead they use a modified technique called variable retention harvesting where key physical structures (e.g. old trees) are retained on the landscape to provide greater habitat diversity components. The downside to this is reduced economic/logistical efficiency — so you have to harvest a larger area– and more roads and disturbance.
There is a legacy of past clearcuts on the landscape. Not much can be done to adjust these stands until the trees get large enough where a series of pre-commercial and commercial thinnings can be done to begin to build both a biologically and economically diverse stand. But we (i.e. the ecosystems) still need areas of early successional forest types to provide key habitat diversity as well as areas of late-seral stage (e.g. old growth).
Hey, it’s nice to see/hear someone chime in that actually knows the background of what they are talking about. Thank you for the contribution; maybe the rest of the crowd can do some research on their local biodiversity statements,(rants), and educate themselves. (well, at least to the point of not sounding like a broken record emerging from clouds of smoke.) What a kick it is to hear the whining and ranting about our ” horrible” industry that established these amazing communities and created our highest (almost only) economic debut; all while the ranters sit in their cozy wood framed, wood walled, wood roofed home, while using their paper products to read and wipe in the morning, along with looking at safe, well managed forests, (out of their wood framed windows), that have been thinned, managed and saved from fire and disease; all because of the timber industry. What full circle trip that was. Wake up folks.
~the headline says it all:
“Green Diamond Announces 50-year Forest Habitat Conservation Plan”
Green Diamond = conservation.
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So no more even-age tree stands? The answer is no. They plan to harvest even-aged stand at 50-70 years of age.
https://www.fws.gov/arcata/es/HCP/2_Green%20Diamond%20FHCP/1a_GD_FHCP.pdf
They are only as green as the law forces them to be (somewhat less than that often). Dont buy the green washing.
The HCP is similar to previous plans in that it calls for commercial harvesting between 45 and 55 years of age, with a few stands surviving till 70 years of age because they couldn’t be cut till then, usually due to too many acres already harvested in a given area.
I commented on their original plan in the 90s, and it was one of the most laborious and confusing reads of all time. A brief look at the new one looks the same. Thank god I’m retired and don’t need to spend a second more on that mess.
Google satellite Green Diamond’s plantation. Make no mistake, their forest is a plantation. They replaced native redwoods time over. They clear cut to horrific degrees. Don’t be fooled by the above comment about what constitutes a “true” clear cut, that’s a game of greenwashing semantics. Green Diamond continues to clear cut. They didn’t want to protect the spotted owl, they had to. I’m all for forest stewardship, they can up their game tenfold starting tomorrow if they really wanted to.
Our county needs to stop rezoning for development, stop allowing development on open land and start replanting redwoods and native trees, allowing them to create the towering canopies that used to dominate the hills to the bay. All of this information is available for free in history books at our local libraries. This area was a rainforest, crucial to the world’s symbiotic ecosystem. It’s being taken over by profiteers who are capitalizing our ecosystem for population growth and infrastructure.
So what did they replace the native redwoods with? I think you are mistaken.
🕯🌳No he’s not bud.
Well, 40-some years ago, when I was planting a lot of the trees they’re clear-cutting now (close to half a million, if my calculations are correct), we started out planting almost exclusively Doug fir on cut-over redwood land (including in Redwood National Park), but at some point someone took note of the attempt to change the predominate species so drastically, and we began planting a mix that was supposed to be based on the pre-logging ratio of fir to redwood.
I doubt that it was, because most of the ground we were planting had been dense old growth redwood forest, with few other species represented, and we were planting a lot more fir, than redwood, but that’s neither here nor there, now.
My point being, the native redwoods were replaced with special, fast growing hybrids – still redwood, but bred for one quality, and one quality only: fast growth, as in putting on volume as quickly as possible.
And that, children – clear-cutting, and then planting fast-growing hybrids, in an even-age stand, is why modern day redwood is trash wood, and old growth is gold.
It’s also why it’s such a shame to see building after building demolished, crunched up, and sent to the landfill, instead of being deconstructed with the aim of recovering as much of that old growth as possible.
Kudos to the people who salvaged the redwood from C/R’s library, and to the Yurok tribe, and the National Park Service, for their plans to deconstruct, rather than demolish, the old youth hostel at Klamath.
We need to see more of that, and less 40-year rotational clear-cuts of hybridized trash wood by timber companies claiming to be acting in an environmentally responsible manner.
Green Diamond is proposing to log in the Sprowell Creek drainage near Garberville, where they purchased the large Barnum holdings. Get involved! A group has formed. Contact Bob Froehlich at KMUD.