To save the planet today why don't everybody just stay at home???

i'd go plant trees but the ground is frozen and its snowin too hard.

Have a lot clearing to do today, probably gonna drop about 80 trees this afternoon.

Help wildlife, make a clear cut!

Clear cut=bad for wildlife here.
Strip and patch cut=good.

please explain the difference between those treatments, and why one method is superior to the other.

Thanks!

I remember Earth Day back in the 1970's, when they let us out of school to go pick up beer bottles in the road ditches. My group had the advantage of knowing where we put most of them.

I put these in 4 yrs ago....this was before I mowed them today!

Our species in the boreal forest needs older growth and overhead cover.large clearcuts means no fur for many years.marten(bread and butter) only move back in after 40-50 year regrowth and dont really get thick until there is a lot of coarse woody debris on the ground and lots of standing dead chicots remaining from the successional forest for nesting.
Fox and beaver will move in sooner,and moose do well.Lynx start to show up again after 25-35 year regrowth.A long time ago there would be clearcuts so large that 5 or 6 traplines would be turned into a wasteland,for fur production for many years.
Patch cutting and strip cutting provides lots of edge habitat which is beneficial for small mammals,and leaves connected core habitat for older growth dependent species like marten and lynx.The cut areas also provide good habitat for moose and beaver.These methods allow for continued harvest and management of all furbearers and in a lot of cases actually improve some areas creating a more diverse ecosystem with more species of fur available.
I have seen these changes take place on my northern line as there were several large clearcuts done there in the 70's.Large forest fires have a similar effect.When I first started managing that line I would get 25 to 40 fox a year and no lynx whatsoever.Today it is nothing to get 25 lynx on the cycle but 6 fox is a good year now as a lot of the bush has changed back to older growth.

.....and tomorrow is Burn a tire for Gretta day!

appreciate the reply, Boco.

just understand, that you are [apparently] biased towards furbearers' habitat...and only certain ones, at that.

someone else may be biased towards early successional species, and clearcuts would be beneficial for them.

I'm in eastern deciduous forests; and here, moderate sized clearcuts [properly executed] are very beneficial to the intolerant, high value timber species, and most of the wildlife species.

in other words...I love me a good clear-cut!

I guess you never seen a large clearcut in the boreal forest,like they used to do here,lol.-its a wasteland,then when they spray all the deciduous re growth its even worse.Then they would go in with the scarifiers to get it ready to plant since it was too large to re seed itself.
When they started strip and patch cutting the bush would reseed itself.
I know of some old huge burns up north that are 50 years old and the trees are still only 2 feet high.We used to call it the golf course,lol.In some of the string bogs in the lowlands the trees are about 3 feet high and 150 years old.

A deciduous forest will come back a lot faster I think.

locally, our clearcuts are usually 50 acres or so in size.

years ago, they tended to be larger.

but you are correct...I have zero experience with boreal forests...ours are eastern deciduous.

you can't compare a hot burn area's recovery with a clearcut's recovery....soil physics/chemistry are significantly altered in a hot burn...apples and oranges.

The original climax sucessional forest all down eastern North America was Pine.

not necessarily.

White pine to be specific in North eastern and north central North America.
There is hardly none left-about 7%.

How is it that you are from Minnesota, I'm from Ohio and we went to the same school?

Did you all put the beer bottles in the ditch?