S.7 Ep.2: The Restoration Forester

Foresters know degraded forests all too well. You’re out on a woods-walk with an enthusiastic landowner, but your eyes go straight to the poor growing stock, invasive plants, and eroded forest soils – the fingerprints of past degradation. Regardless, you set about the complex task of developing a prescription that will nudge this forest towards a brighter future. Foresters don’t always think of themselves as restorationists, but in many ways, the tools of silviculture are the tools of restoration. In this episode of SilviCast, we dive into the science and practice of forest restoration with John Stanturf, visiting professor at the Estonian University of Life Sciences and Senior Forest Restoration Specialist with InNovaSilva. With more than 30 years of experience researching forest restoration in both temperate and tropical forests around the world, John brings a global perspective to the question of what it means to restore a forest. 

Transcript

S7 E2 - The Restoration Forester

[Greg Edge]

Welcome to Silvicast, the podcast about all things silviculture. I'm Greg Edge, retired silviculturist with the Wisconsin DNR Division of Forestry.

[Brad Hutnik]

And I'm Brad Hutnik, Wisconsin DNR silviculturist, still working until I can't find my way back to the truck. And we're your hosts for today's show. Guten Morgen, Mr. Edge.

[Greg Edge]

Hey, hey, good morning, Brad.

[Brad Hutnik]

I don't want to be all, you know, mushy here, but I got you a Christmas gift.

[Greg Edge]

Oh, that's so nice of you. You didn't have to do that. 

[Brad Hutnik]

Yeah. And it's a little past Christmas, but you know, it is what it is.

[Greg Edge]

Yeah. What is it?

[Brad Hutnik]

I noticed that you're, I don't know, getting a little thin up top lately.

If you know what I mean now, and it's, it's not a bad thing. Less hair, more head, as they say.

[Greg Edge]

Gee, thanks, Bradley. That is so considerate of you.

[Brad Hutnik]

Oh, go on, go on. Now you're just supposed to rub a little of this goop on top of your head every day.

[Greg Edge]

Gross! 

[Brad Hutnik]

And soon it'll restore a thick, full head of hair. Now, come on.

You don't want to hang on to that degraded stand, my friend. And what do you have to lose, Greg? 

[Greg Edge]

My dignity? Oh, it looks like motor oil. 

[Brad Hutnik]

Well, that just means it's potent, my friend.

[Greg Edge]

Potent. Hey, Brad, why don't you try it first? I noticed pheasant hunting this fall that the sun bounces a little more brightly off your head these days, if you know what I mean.

[Brad Hutnik]

Yeah, Greg, you seem to be missing the point of the experiment here. Now, if we see positive results restoring your head, then perhaps we'll expand the testing population. If on the other hand, you start looking like a Chia pet, well, you know, maybe we'll just cut this experiment short.

[Greg Edge]

Yeah. Okay. I'm going to start sprouting green Brussels sprouts up there or something.

[Brad Hutnik]

We're going to find out, Greg. So have at it.

[Greg Edge]

Okay. Well, first of all, Bradley, I would not consider my hair a degraded stand, at least not yet, and secondly, I have become wise to your experiments. As always, I seem to be the test subject in these things.

[Brad Hutnik]

No, it's true. 

[Greg Edge]

However, it is timely that you're thinking about restoring degraded conditions because today on Silvicast, and this is our transition, we'll be talking with John Standturf, visiting professor at Estonia University of Life Sciences and Senior Forest Restoration Specialist at Innovasilva. John, as you know, I know, you know, has conducted forest research in temperate and tropical forests throughout the world for over 30 years, specializing in the functional restoration of degraded forests.

[Brad Hutnik]

Yeah. Greg, as you know, I'm a huge fan of John's work over the years. He's really helped me understand the concepts behind restoring and rehabilitating degraded forests and the foundation for a lot of our conversations that have gone on with that.

And I'm sure he can even help with your hair too. 

[Greg Edge]

And yours, of course. 

[Brad Hutnik]

Yeah. And mine.

[Greg Edge]

Thank you to our season sponsors, Family Forest Carbon Program and Nelson Paint Company. You make the Silvicast world go round.

[Brad Hutnik]

John Stanturf, welcome to Silvicast. For our listeners, can you tell us a little bit about where you work, who you are and what you do?

[John Stanturf]

Well, that could take the whole podcast, but I'll try to keep it short. I'm semi-retired. I spent 26 years with the U.S. Forest Service, retired going on eight years ago now. It's hard to believe it's been that long. Since then, I've been a visiting professor at the Estonian University of Life Sciences. And people are always very curious about that.

And just briefly, I started working with those colleagues back in the nineties when they got independence from the Soviet Union and it's just developed. And so when I retired, I wanted a university connection and that was the one that fit the best. So even though I'm a visiting professor there, I live in upstate New York, actually in Rochester, New York.

[Brad Hutnik]

Wow, cool. And you've had a lot of, or maybe I shouldn't say a lot, but you've had intern international forestry has been kind of cooked into you a little bit. So looking into your background, it looks like you worked early in your career, you worked in Israel on forestry as well, correct?

[John Stanturf]

Right. I had a postdoc there for a year.

[Brad Hutnik]

Yeah. Which is fascinating. Cause I was just reading a, an article about early tree planting in Israel as kind of a, a way to, I don't know, it was like a nationalized spirit for, you know, like plant the trees and then the Jewish holiday for planting trees as well.

[John Stanturf]

Right. Tu BiShvat. Yeah. That's still a big deal. Yeah.

[Brad Hutnik]

It's fascinating though. So that was really cool.

[John Stanturf]

Yeah. So it's probably should mention that I grew up in an army family and we lived in Germany for six years. So from an early age, I've had an international outlook.

[Greg Edge]

Yeah. And we're going to be talking about really your focus for years on forest restoration. And I just, it's kind of neat to see that international connections, because there's, as you know, so much going on in terms of restoration and restoration need across, not just in our country, but across the world.

So that's neat that you're bringing that to the conversation.

[Brad Hutnik]

And maybe just to, to start us off, we can talk about it really broadly and then kind of work through some things with this, how would you broadly define forest restoration?

[John Stanturf]

I think the simplest way to define it is it's reversing degradation. So it's taking the opposite trajectory, the opposite path for degradation. The actuality is of course, much more complicated than that.

[Brad Hutnik]

Yeah, that's true. It's like between two poles, right? So you kind of have degradation kind of this at one end and then what's at the other end of that then?

[John Stanturf]

Well, the way I've expressed it is, is this idealized native forest. I hate the word natural, and I'm sure we're going to talk about that later, but the native forest is this idealized and everyone has their own ideal of what that is, whether it's a very primitive forest with no human influence or, you know, something a little more managed, that's different perspectives that have come to play. One of the things that's talked a lot about in restoration is what is that end point that you're striving for?

[Greg Edge]

From a forester's perspective, John, do you see foresters as restorationists or is that like a distinct role in the profession or other professions being a restorationist?

[John Stanturf]

Yes. 

[Greg Edge]

Yes, all of the above.

[John Stanturf]

Yeah, the way I look at it is that forest restoration does and should use the tools of silviculture. I mean, silviculturists, we have a lot of experience in how to manage and work with nature and forest. It's applied ecology, if you will.

And so we should be using those tools in restoration. In practice, though, that sort of the line between normal silviculture or normal forestry and restoration is pretty blurred, and I think it depends on what it is on the ground. To me, restoration comes into play when the forest ecosystem has been so disturbed or so degraded that you can't rely on sort of self-renewing natural processes.

It takes a little bit of a nudge to move it in the right direction. I guess that's why I can't give you a definitive answer about that.

[Greg Edge]

I like that, thinking about it from the terms of silviculture, because Brad and I have had this conversation a lot with foresters about not painting themselves into a corner as a one-trick pony, but understanding silviculture covers a broad range of many different objectives. And so, you know, foresters may be working in the realm of a more traditional, what we would consider restoration to some native forest type, or they might be working, you know, more of a production, forestry and plantation, but silviculture covers all of those ranges. So I like just thinking about that in terms of the applied process of silviculture, and we just apply it based on what all the different goals are.

[John Stanturf]

Exactly. Yeah. Being very clear about what your objectives are is important.

You know, I think that to me, what we've seen over several hundred years has been the flow of silviculture has been towards simplifying and prediction, predictability, but restoration is going in the opposite direction of complexity and resilience. And I think what we're seeing in academic silviculture anyways, is a movement in that direction, you know, the silviculture complexity of Putman and Bauhaus and those people is, I think that's the forefront of, and that's, it's always been there, but now we're putting more emphasis on it in silviculture and that's working down at the ground level and applied forest management more and more.

[Brad Hutnik]

Yeah. You know, it strikes me, Greg, and oftentimes, and I think, John, you probably see this too, it seems like we talk about restoration and we talk about forestry and they're two different worlds. 

So when we think about like, you know, prairie restoration or Savannah restoration, or like here in the upper Midwest, we talk about things like that. And then we have forestry, which I think foresters are just a little uncomfortable saying that they're restorationists, that they're doing restoration, even though they might be doing it. And I suppose it's because of maybe perceptions of how the term has been used in the past.

[John Stanturf]

Yeah. I think the three of us are old enough to remember some of the consternation when ecosystem management came in and there was a feeling amongst, especially field foresters, that they were being criticized for what they'd done in the past. You know, that this new thinking would say, well, everything you've done in the past is wrong and we need to do it differently.

And so there was a bit of defensiveness that came up, understandably.

[Greg Edge]

Yeah.

[John Stanturf]

You know, and I think, I think we're hopefully beyond that today. And because the challenges are, are facing everybody and they're just immense and we've got to work together on it.

[Greg Edge]

I hope there's a broader recognition of all those range or various goals that come into play on land management. And it's, as I said, not one thing, one size fits all, but we manage based on those objectives. And so maybe those perceptions are changing.

[John Stanturf]

Yeah, hopefully.

[Brad Hutnik]

Well, you know, we mentioned it earlier and then maybe it's good to go think about what it was when we talked about restoration and then maybe that idea of degradation. So maybe it's time to dig in a little bit about what degradation itself is. It seems like, you know, this could take a number of different forms as well.

So how would you kind of define or think about a degraded forest?

[John Stanturf]

Yeah, that's, that's certainly something that's been discussed a lot. And, you know, there's sort of three official, if you will, definitions of degradation. The FAO, the CBD, the Commission on Biological Diversity, and the UNFCC, the Climate Change Group, all have their own definition of degradation.

And they all pretty much coincide that degradation is a diminishment of the ability to provide ecosystem services and functioning of a forest. Where they differ is in the causation. FAO says degradation is degradation, whatever the cause, I'm paraphrasing, of course.

CBD says it has to have a human component. It's humans that cause degradation. If humans weren't there, then everything would be fine, basically.

UNFCC is more concerned about the carbon and whether carbon is being affected, carbon sequestration and storage is being affected. So there's these three streams or these three definitions of degradation, if you will, and they have their commonalities, but there's also these slight differences. So to me, I like the FAO definition that, you know, degradation is, it is what it is, it doesn't matter the cause, because sometimes it's hard to tease out the cause, or it's a combination of things that, you know, it's attribution of the cause is okay as an academic thing, but maybe it's not so important.

Well, having said that, though, that one of the first tenets of restoration is stop whatever is causing the degradation. You know, otherwise you're just pushing the boulder up the hill.

[Greg Edge]

So John, Brad and I were thinking about examples just from our world in terms of degradation. And so the obvious one that our foresters deal a lot with is high grading. So just, especially in our hardwood stands.

So really going into stands where there isn't much good growing stock anymore or lack of seed sources of desirable species, that sort of thing. So that seems like an obvious one, right? 

[John Stanturf]

Yes, absolutely.

[Greg Edge]

From a human cause standpoint. And then Brad and I got into this, I guess, philosophical debate.

[Brad Hutnik]

No alcohol involved, Greg. No alcohol involved.

[Greg Edge]

So maybe you can solve this one. In Wisconsin, we've had a conversation around black locust, which is a species which is not native to Wisconsin. It comes just to the southern border of the state naturally, but it was planted for various reasons, for agricultural erosion control.

And it also has seeded into other areas. So some people see it as an invasive and other people see it as, well, it actually, you can manage it and it is maybe a different forest type. So is that degrading our forest stands or is that just a new state?

[John Stanturf]

Yeah, well, black locust is a species of concern in a lot of places, and Europeans are concerned about it, too. And the attitude towards it differs from one country to another. This is getting all into an entirely different field of invasion ecology, too.

And there's a lot of discussion there about what exactly are we talking about? Non-native, invasive, exotic, you know, all kinds of terminology. And different people have sort of tried to sort through that.

I think that this is an issue that we will have to deal with even more in the future because of the conditions that are changing at the edge of a lot of species range with climate change. And so how much novelty are we going to tolerate in our forests to manage? And that's what it comes down to is how much are we willing to accept?

I would say if the black locust is invading into different ecosystems and changing the functioning, crowding out other species, yes, then it's of concern. If it's something that's adapting and maybe enhancing the system, why not accept it? If it's something that's going to be, I mean, maybe it'll be like some of the other species that we're dealing with, they'll be the last one standing when climate changes and in the wrong direction for us.

So let's be happy we've still got a forest cover. That's kind of the real pessimistic view, I guess.

[Greg Edge]

As you said, maybe that idea of native on the other end is, a little bit, depends on your objectives and what in the situation you're talking about.

[Brad Hutnik]

Greg, what I hear John saying is Brad was absolutely correct in that conversation that you had with Greg. So I'm not sure if you got caught that, but…

[Greg Edge]

You just can't sell me on black locust. I'm sorry, Brad. 

[Brad Hutnik]

Yeah, all right. All right. Well, we'll keep working. We'll keep working.

[Greg Edge]

It does make good fence posts, I'll give you that.

[Brad Hutnik]

But it is one of those things where it's like context matters, right? So because like we have the example here, we kill it in prairies. We don't want it going into prairies.

But then we have silvipasture advocates that are working with black locust as a part of what they're doing for the structure and function for what they want. And so it's like you said, it's really the devil's in the details.

[John Stanturf]

Yeah. We're going to be facing these questions with assisted migration with a lot of different other species, too. So these are our real concerns.

And it gets down to what your perception of native and naturalness is, which is an embedded in all these discussions about restoration as well.

[Greg Edge]

So, John, thinking about degraded stands, as I said, we work in them, unfortunately, a lot. We talk to our foresters many times about having good stand assessment as really sort of foundational in developing a good silvicultural prescription for the stand. Yet I know that foresters struggle oftentimes on deciding whether a stand is degraded or not, because it could be, as you said, a little bit in the eye of the beholder.

And there's like this really kind of wide range of sort of graduations of degraded. I'm just thinking from a field-based perspective, are there indicators that foresters can look at within stands to try to make those decisions about whether it's degraded or not?

[John Stanturf]

Yeah, I think so. And I think they're probably some of the things they may already be looking at, but change their perspective a little bit on that. I think a good stand assessment, knowing where you are, a good baseline is critical.

And anything we do, we're going to try to change it. To me, I think it's important for a forester to have a good mental picture of what a healthy stand would look like based on his or her experience and evidence, what we learned from manipulating stands. That probably changes over time, but it also then brings in, well, what's the objective that you're looking at the stand for?

What are you looking for? What would be the indicators of not good to you? So what I would say, or what I would do if it was me looking at a stand, I'd just go through the same things probably everyone else looks at.

What does individual trees look like? Do they have good crowns? And of course, all of these are in reference to some baseline or some mental picture you have of what it should look like.

Are there signs of excessive disease on the trunks? Does that look outside of the range of normal to you? Is the stand adequately stocked?

Is it understocked or overstocked? And of course, that depends on species composition and age of the stand. So these are not things that you can put one number on.

It's something that's going to change over time as stands develop. And then what's the condition of the soil surface? Do you see signs of soil erosion?

Are there big, coarse roots sticking up above the soil surface? Is there a sign of a lot of rutting or compaction, maybe, from a lot of machinery moving around in the stand? Of course, over time, some of these things are going to get camouflaged as the stand develops, and you may not see some of these things right away.

But these are just walking through. This is the kind of stuff you can see. And then the high-grading thing that we talked about before, is there advanced regeneration of the species that we would think would be not only desirable from whatever objective standpoint we're bringing through with the frame, but also from what you would expect to be there, given the site, the climate, the so-called natural forest.

What should the species composition be? And then in the understory, are there invasive species? There's a lot of things that I know are invasive that I probably couldn't recognize in the field, but we should be better at recognizing those things.

A little aside here, back when I lived in Georgia, I spent three years fighting privet in my backyard. Hard to get rid of that. So in a forest, it's even worse.

And then there's just awareness of the kind of stand management that's been practiced. What were people trying to do? Were they successful or not?

And then we have the special instances in fire-adapted forests. Is there an accumulation of hazardous fuels because of fire suppression? In a wet forest, are there signs that the normal inundation regime has been changed?

Is it too dry or too wet? You can usually tell by the overstory species are there, would they have been able to regenerate under the inundation regime that you've got today? So just some of the things.

And then probably something that's not going to be encountered by foresters in your neck of the woods, but in the tropics and other places where I've worked, signs of encroachment, especially into protected areas, is a big thing that you look for. People just coming in and farming in areas where they shouldn't be.

[Greg Edge]

I was going to ask what kind of encroachment, but you're talking like human land use encroachments into that forest. 

[John Stanturf]

Exactly.

[Greg Edge]

What I like what you said, John and Brad, you and I talk a lot with foresters about, that foresters are the local experts. Like they start to know and learn their forest.

And to think about what those baselines look like that you're talking about based on their habitat types and their forests at various stages, I think is really important. Because as you said, you need something to compare it to.

[John Stanturf]

Yeah.

[Greg Edge]

And then it can give you an idea of what the different, say, soils and habitat types in your area can develop. What's its potential is really, I think, a good way to start to look at that.

[Brad Hutnik]

I wonder, because sometimes maybe having like a really open eye to it too, based on some of that. So thinking about, John, you said you're in upstate New York and thinking about here in Wisconsin, if I walk into a solid sugar maple stand that maybe formerly had a ton of species diversity, I might say, hey, this is fine for production, but in a way, ecologically we're degraded. We have lack of capacity for adaptation and some other things.

So that feels to me like sometimes there might be some tough realizations too. Like it might not necessarily be, you know, like it's a scale of degradation, but it's still not maybe the ideal for something like that.

[John Stanturf]

Yeah. And then that gets to being very clear about your objectives.

[Brad Hutnik]

Right.

[John Stanturf]

You know, if your objective is production and you feel that that kind of simplification is going to be resilient under future climate conditions, then yeah, go for it. Why not? We need it.

But if it was, I'm trying to think of another species that sugar maple is probably one that's not going to thrive under a lot of conditions. Red maple on the other hand has gotten a bad rep, but it's a good species too if it's managed correctly and not abused. So things are changing and we have to be, I think, fairly humble about our ability to predict what is going to be the result of some of our actions in the forest.

So we should try to keep it as resilient as possible.

[Brad Hutnik]

Yeah. And just thinking about degradation, would we want to take a look at the landscape around our area as well to kind of inform it? Because I know oftentimes we get trapped at the stand and then we don't really think about what's happening around us, but sometimes maybe it's something we can do something about.

Maybe it's something just to take into account.

[John Stanturf]

Yeah. And that's certainly something that has come to the fore in the restoration field with looking at forest landscapes rather than small stands. And we'll probably talk about different approaches to restoration where that comes to play.

That scale. Yeah. And in looking at landscapes, you're looking at future land use.

Just to give an example from a restoration standpoint, in Brazil and the Atlantic Forest Restoration, they've done a lot of work and there's a whole cooperative of different organizations involved here. But they've decided to focus their efforts on restoring areas that are remote from where likely land use change is going to happen. So that's a realization that, yeah, there's urbanization, there's farming, there's other things.

Rather than fighting that, let's put our limited resources into places where it's fairly remote from those things happening. So that's an awareness of landscape dynamics and land use dynamics that's important in deciding where to work and what to do. Yeah.

[Brad Hutnik]

Season 7 of Silvicast is made possible thanks to sponsors like the Family Forest Carbon Program. The Family Forest Carbon Program pays landowners to improve the health of their land and increase the long-term value of their property. The program equips landowners with resources and support to implement sustainable practices to help them reach their own goals for their woodlands, while also improving the health of their forests and our planet.

To learn more about how you can access these benefits for our forests, visit familyforestcarbon.org.

[Greg Edge]

John, in some of your work that Brad and I read, coming into this conversation, you talked about that scale of starting with degraded and then moving to, you mentioned earlier, a native forest, and sometimes referred to as a natural forest. And I think before we go on, we should just maybe touch on that a little bit, just like what does that mean? And does it always involve some target of a historical condition?

Are we always trying to bring back what was, or is it much broader than that? What does that other end of the spectrum look like to you?

[John Stanturf]

Yeah, that's a big topic. One of the most contentious debates I get into with people is whether a plantation is a forest, which gets right at the nub of what's natural, what's native, that kind of thing. But I think this whole idea of naturalness and nativity is just, it's embedded in the whole restoration field.

People have different perceptions of what that means. I think, well, a really good reference that I wrote into was a publication back in the 90s by a fellow named Davis. He was working out west, and he wrestled with this idea of naturalness, and he came up with three indicators of naturalness.

And I think these are very much what I see in the field today. The first is what would be the nature of the system if you took humans completely out of it? And that's what a lot of people strive to do with restoration.

Personally, I think that's a futile effort, because we are so pervasive that it's hard to take humans out of the picture. You know, we see that even in some of the tropical forests that we've considered pristine and little affected by humans. You know, as they really get into it, they're finding, oh, yeah, those folks are actually gardening this forest.

That's why we have, you know, more Brazil nut in the forest than would normally be there, things like that. So that, I think, is probably not a great indicator. But the degree of human influence would be important in deciding whether something was natural or not.

The second thing that Davis talked about was the energy subsidy supplied by humans required to maintain the functioning. Now, I read that as how much management is necessary to overcome natural tendencies. And he was writing back in the 90s, you know, at the time when Howard Odom was coming up with ecological energetics and the whole flow of energy through systems.

So I think that's why he phrased it that way. So to me, it's the level of human input, the level of management that's necessary to maintain the system in the state that is there. The third one is the one that probably a lot of people talk about is what's the complement of native species currently in the area compared to the suite you would expect?

So that's where the reference condition comes in and the discussion, the argument that we have about what's the proper reference? What should we be trying to do? Is it historical or is it something else?

And that depends on your approach to restoration. So you can see the similarities here to the degradation trajectory I talked about and reversing that trajectory in restoration. So even if you remove humans from the system, the system's dynamic.

It's not static. It's not going to stay the same way that you see it or your grandfather or grandmother saw it. It's going to change.

We know that. It's inevitable. And now we're beginning to realize it and deal with it more.

You know, there's that concept of natural range of variation. So yeah, OK. So there is going to be variation in the way stands develop and what happens over time.

And whether you, well, the whole idea is about succession. That's a whole other thing. Where I worked in Bottomland Hardwoods, we had to recognize that there were some predictable trajectories of stand composition based on the stand development, aging, and when different disturbances happened to replace species in the stand.

There was also the whole thing about river processes changing. So, you know, river change course. So, yeah, it might have been the river bottom, you know, 50 years ago.

But now the river's changed course and you've got a cottonwood stand growing up there on that site. So those things change. So that, you know, realizing the dynamics of ecosystems is something that we have just, I would say, in the last 50 years started to incorporate into our understanding of ecology and silviculture.

And we're just at the beginning of that. You know, the fringe of understanding that complexity and those dynamics.

[Brad Hutnik]

But I took away from some of the reading getting ready for today is kind of that natural or native forest really isn't fixed. Or I'm sorry. So it's kind of this range of conditions that could have occurred.

And so trying to pick one arbitrary place may be problematic. You might have to pick one in order to have targets, but it's not like there is one only that you might have a multiple possible pathways to take.

[John Stanturf]

Right. And one of the drawbacks of picking one only or even several is that the conditions that develop that forest, establish that forest may not be operating today. So it may not be possible to get those same results or that same type of forest composition and structure today.

And especially tomorrow with climate change.

[Greg Edge]

I just had that conversation about bottomland hardwoods with some colleagues of mine on the upper Mississippi and trying to figure out those successional pathways. Now that we have a lock and dam system that's really changed the rules of the game on that. So it's just interesting, as you said, Brad, there's this wide range and then all of a sudden you have a system that's maybe not operating the same that it was.

[John Stanturf]

And what we found in the Delta in the South was that when people talked about restoring hydrology as a restoration method, they weren't restoring hydrology. They were changing it because you couldn't go against the Corps of Engineers and the regional drainage and change that they had done. You can do something locally, but yeah.

And then you had to worry about your neighbors because if you flooded the neighbor's farm, because you blocked up a drainage channel, then you were in trouble there too. So, yeah.

[Greg Edge]

So what I'm hearing you say, John, that other end of the spectrum, that natural forest, there's a wide range there and we can't decouple it from what the objectives and the facts on the ground that we're dealing with there are.

[John Stanturf]

That's a good way of putting it. Exactly.

[Brad Hutnik]

Yeah, so I think maybe this takes it down to, and I thought some of the things that you did really well were kind of define some paradigms and maybe some terms that we can use within those because it kind of makes it so that we're all maybe speaking the same language or we're all kind of, you know, it's very, restoration is so broad that maybe we can kind of bring some terms down. So you had a couple of papers where you talked about four paradigms for what we do in restoration and those were revegetation, ecological restoration, forest landscape restoration, and functional restoration. So maybe you could kind of explain what those are and maybe the differences between them.

[John Stanturf]

Sure. Yeah. Revegetation is the kind of restoration that's been going on for centuries.

We didn't call it restoration then. We just called it, you know, we were trying to fix something that was broken. It was trying to counter soil erosion or salinization or overgrazing or something by putting trees in the landscape.

So the paradigm then was let's get it green. Don't worry about the species. And sometimes we couldn't worry about the species.

We could only do what we could do because the sites were so degraded. Good example of that would be the degraded heathlands in northern Europe. The only thing that they could grow in Denmark on those lands to begin with was pine.

Now, because the pines have changed the whole ecosystem and the microclimate and the soil, broadleaves can be established into those stands. So they were doing restoration. They didn't call it that.

They were reclaiming the land. So that was kind of the original or this long-term thing about restoration. Then ecological restoration was a development where we say, well, you know, it's not just about stopping the degradation and getting trees in the landscape.

It's about what trees are there. So the species composition became important. And then this idea of restoring to some historic past.

And of course, in North America, our historic past would go back to pre-Columbian times or pre-European colonization or however you want to phrase it. Then there's that whole mystique about the ecological Indian and native indigenous peoples didn't really affect the environment very much, which we're coming to find was not really true. My favorite thing was the story that was told in the South by Bartram and others was that a squirrel could go from the Atlantic to the Mississippi River and never touch ground.

Well, what Bartram was looking at was the second growth forest after diseases killed off the native peoples so that he wasn't looking at the original forest. So that's the historic aside. But that's kind of the trap of not understanding land use history that a lot of people can get into.

So anyway, so ecological restoration really developed out of practitioners trying to restore, usually small areas, you know, we would call them stands, patches, whatever, to some naturalness or historic framework, historic endpoint. About, well, people would set the time frame in about the year 2000. The people working in the tropics, especially, were frustrated with the kind of tree planting, afforestation that was being funded by the World Bank, which was planting exotic species on traditional ownerships without any regard to the effects on the local people.

So it was a response to that where they said, no, wait a minute, there's something more important going on here. We should be doing this differently. So forest landscape restoration then became the vehicle for that.

And the difference between that and ecological restoration was it put people into the frame. It said we should put equal weight on restoring ecological integrity and human livelihoods. So that was sort of a shift in thinking on two fronts.

It expanded the looking at restoration from the small stand or individual stands one at a time to, well, what's the whole landscape? What should that look like? So landscape and then people were added to the picture there of restoration.

Functional restoration is really kind of at the intersection of those two viewpoints. It says, yes, we should restore. We can restore it for different objectives.

It's more important to restore the functions of forests than some historic past condition. And it doesn't specifically bring or allow human livelihoods into the picture. But in practice, it should.

So it's kind of a forest landscape restoration light, if you will. So it's where my head's at. It's the technical aspects of how do you restore.

And then the social scientists can worry about the people. That's not really the way I think about it, but that's an extreme view. Tell me what you want.

I'll tell you how to get it done.

[Brad Hutnik]

And so with that functional, is it more like what the system or what the forest is doing as opposed to the individual pieces being the important part? So I'm thinking of an example. Maybe we have pine plantations that may be in an area that maybe don't have forest, but we still like the idea that there's forest cover.

Forest cover plays a certain role for bird species in an area. So we'd say, even though it might not have been something that was there before, functionally, it's giving us something that we want.

[John Stanturf]

Yes, yeah. And that's where that argument about whether it's a plantation of forest or not comes into play. It's providing forest functions.

Maybe not to the full extent of the potential of the site, but it is providing functions. And back to what we talked about earlier about the flow of silviculture, simplification and predictability. Well, now we're saying that we have different objectives that we're allowing for complexity.

We're trying to manage for complexity. So in a landscape, and you see this a lot in the tropics where they have these vast areas and exotic plantations, there's a requirement for natural native forests along river courses, riparian areas. So there's a place in the mosaic of the landscape for both kinds of forest.

And they're providing forest functions with different emphasis, but it's all forest, to me anyway.

[Greg Edge]

Brad, I keep thinking of our friend Doug who wanted us to do an episode on plantations. Fake forests?

[Brad Hutnik]

 Yeah, that's right.  We'll bring him in at some point.

[Greg Edge]

We're working on it, Doug. 

[Brad Hutnik]

That'll be the Silvicast After Hours episode.

[John Stanturf]

Well, you know, people have this view of plantations as always being exotic species and monocultures and intensively managed. A lot of so-called native forests or natural forests around the world were planted for us. They weren't managed intensively, but they were planted.

So we get all hung up with a lot of baggage on some of these terms that get misused and misunderstood. And I'm like you guys. I'm always fighting against that.

Let's be very precise in the terms that we use. Everybody understands the same thing about them instead of arguing past each other.

[Greg Edge]

Some of this also reminds me of a past conversation we had about the triad approach of, you know, some places on that landscape are intensively managed. Others are reserve areas and others are somewhere in between.

So maybe that kind of fits into that forest landscape restoration idea.

[Brad Hutnik]

Yeah. Well, you had three more terms that I think actually kind of dig down and you probably can apply these within each of them. And so these were rehabilitation, reconstruction, and reclamation.

And I think this is really good because I think the terms allow us to be real specific. And like we've talked about in the past, Greg, you know, that one of the good things and bad things about forestry is that, you know, we're probably we're talking to people in the future about what we're doing right now. And so if we're not very precise about what we're doing right now, then their ability to interpret what we were doing is always limited.

So us using terms and using them correctly and then being able to convey that to both our colleagues and to people in the future are working with these things are great. So there were three more rehabilitation, reconstruction, and reclamation.

[John Stanturf]

Yeah. I probably use those terms differently than many people do. You know, people that come from the ecological restoration paradigm would say those are not real restoration.

Those are things that you do that aren't quite restoration. But to me, they are. Again, it's along that trajectory where I use the term reclamation when the site has been so degraded that trees or forests would have a hard time naturally establishing there.

So think of of mined land or in particular, mine land or something that's been so degraded, so polluted, maybe the example from northwestern Pennsylvania would be brine spills. You know, we're from oil wells with this flush the whole area with with a high saline concentrated brine and what develops after that. So reclamation, then, is when you've got a physical barrier to restoration that has to be overcome.

If you go back in time, reclamation had a little different meaning. And that should probably be brought into the discussion here. Because, you know, right now we have a Bureau of Reclamation, and that's all about irrigating the arid lands.

So reclamation was the idea that, well, there's all this wasteland out there that needs to be made productive. So that's a little different in the sense that, for me, the reclamation is on the degraded site where that time and place, it was land that was not productive in our view, and we were going to make it so. So it was fixing nature rather than repairing nature.

So that's reclamation. And then rehabilitation would be where you have a biological barrier to restoration. So rehabilitation, I applied that to where you were no longer satisfied with the kind of forests that were there, and they needed to be rehabilitated.

So the high graded forest would be a good example. Another example would be plantations or planted forests of species that were probably beyond their native range, like they're discovering in Europe now with Norway spruce, is no longer a viable candidate in a lot of places because of changing temperature and precipitation. In Denmark, it was never a good one.

It wasn't wind stable. So that was something that they dealt with. There was a movement, especially probably beginning about 20, 25 years ago in central Europe of rehabilitating those kinds of stands into mixed species or other species.

So that was changing the species composition or structure was rehabilitating the stand. And then reconstruction, I used for those areas that had not been forest for some time. Afforestation would be the active way of restoring.

And then you have the passive restoration and just kind of leaving it alone or fencing it to keep the animals out, that kind of thing. So natural regeneration, essentially.

[Greg Edge]

So you don't have a physical barrier necessarily. It's just you don't have the players in place. 

And you either got to let them naturally move in or you move them in yourself. 

[John Stanturf]

Exactly. 

[Brad Hutnik]

Yeah, I was gonna say, I personally love those because I think that really helps us. And it's just a matter of everyone kind of using the term. So hopefully, you know, us talking about it here, we'll get people, hopefully at least our three listeners will start to use it.

[Greg Edge]

Well, I think for us, a lot of our foresters would be doing rehabilitation. So we're dealing with existing stands that maybe are missing elements that we want. And we're trying to enhance or bring those back.

So we're trying to rehabilitate that stand on that scale. So I keep thinking of your scale from like, you know, degraded up to a native forest. And we're probably somewhere in the middle.

A lot of times it's just not quite where we want it to be because of past history or whatever. And we're just trying to introduce some silviculture to improve those aspects of it. 

[Brad Hutnik]

You know, I think about restoration. And I think about, you know, it's always it seems to me like we're restore and that prefix read mean is kind of going, you know, back to something we're not going ahead. And I always think about, you know, you watch financial services ads, and they say very, very quickly, past performance does not guarantee future results, you know, and you're like, what, what did he just say kind of thing.

And so it's kind of in restoration, we kind of have that same thing. So can we apply restoration with an eye on the future? It's kind of one of those philosophical things.

But I think it's, maybe it's a little more physical or a little more concrete than I think.

[John Stanturf]

I agree with you. I think we must apply restoration with an eye to the future. I think we're doing a disservice to ourselves and society if we're just looking in the rear view mirror, because things are going to change.

Now, having said that, we have to be very clear about what, where we think we're going to be in terms of future climate. You know, when we're doing this, because there are going to be areas where climate is not going to change that drastically. So we can continue as we have.

It's kind of at the margins, though, at the edges of the leading and following edge of species distributions. That's where the real challenge is going to be, is can we maintain the same species? What level of novelty are we willing to entertain?

What other species are we going to allow? And how active are we going to be at introducing new species into that frame? Species that maybe are functionally similar to the species that we have.

This is something they're looking at in Europe with, say, what's called Oriental Beech, moving it into Western Europe in place of their European Beach. It's a question of whether those are really different species, but that's neither here nor there. Or is it even things like different provenances of our species?

So wide-ranging species moving more southerly, warm, drought-tolerant species into the northern forest. There's some really great work that's going on in your forest right now with the DREAM project and some others that are looking at exactly those issues. And then getting a little farther afield there, are we willing to accept biologically changed species?

Biotech that's going to maybe introduce more drought-tolerant through gene manipulation or other things. Back to that idea of what's a native, what's a native species? How much of that are we as a society or individual landowners willing to allow that to come in?

And that's not an exotic question for the future. There's one right now, I think, about chestnut. We've got two different streams of trying to bring chestnut in, the traditional tree breeding versus the biotech.

I've had an interesting discussion with people about that in the restoration community. They're all about native species. I said, well, do you consider that a native species?

How much of that of foreign species in there are you willing to allow? Oh, it's OK as long as it's for restoration. But if it was for commercial purposes, no, we wouldn't allow that.

So you get those perceptions and value judgments that come in. But that's the real world. Those are the kinds of things that we as foresters will have to deal with down the road.

[Brad Hutnik]

Yeah, I thought there was a fascinating and you recall it was like 2014, 2015. There were a series, there was a commentary and then a series of things on that that you were part of. And I think that there really kind of talked about that and talked about this idea of restoration.

Are we locked to these things in the past or are we kind of changing it for the future? And we'll make that available in the show notes for people to read. You guys did a really nice job of kind of talking about that same thing.

[John Stanturf]

Yeah, you're talking about that paper with Cass Dumbrow, I imagine.

[Brad Hutnik]

And I think one thing you mentioned in the end of it, and I wrote it down here because I thought it was really cool. You said, perhaps new terminology and dare we say a new discipline of transition management or the aforementioned intervention ecology are discussions that are not misguided. So it's kind of even pointing the way forward for maybe we'll have interventionists in the future instead of restorationists.

[John Stanturf]

In a sense, the restorationists are interventionists. We are intervening necessarily. And so, yeah.

[Greg Edge]

John, you said oftentimes in restoration, we are nudging a system to go in a better direction. And so Brad and I talk about nudging a lot too. And I think that's a lot of times that's what we are doing and can do, right?

Like what we're capable of doing. And then we also talk a lot about time. We often don't give enough time for these systems to develop.

And John, you gave an example of plantations in Europe. And then over time, that changing that system back to where it can native hardwoods can move into that system. And so giving that time to happen, I think, is really important.

And just recognizing the complexity of the systems that we're working with and how our thinking has changed to realize, boy, these are complex and trying to allow for the different pathways. And that ultimate native forest, natural forest, whatever we want to call it, you really can't decouple it from us in terms of what our goals and objectives are for that land. And that's kind of like a basic silvicultural prescription paradigm, right?

You always, it's what your site has and what your goals are for that site. You have to, you can't decouple those. So those are just some things that struck home with me.

And so I was just thinking about, based on your career working with the Forest Service and working with foresters all around the world, do you have any final piece of advice for those foresters who are trying to integrate these concepts into the work that they do every day?

[John Stanturf]

The mantra that I'm and others are using today is that it's all about the right tree in the right place for the right purpose. Deciding what right is in each of those instances is the difficult question, but it's something that we should each decide for ourselves. So with that in mind, I'd say I would give, you know, five pieces of advice.

It's not exactly Letterman's top 10 list. The other ones I can come up with.

[Greg Edge]

No, that's good. Yeah, that's good.

[John Stanturf]

The first one is make sure that whatever the degrading process was is no longer operating because there's no point in spending a lot of time and effort in restoring something that's going to be destroyed, you know, and reason with reasonable expectation that will happen. So that's not always easy to do because you're not always sure what that process was. And that's where land use history and, you know, finding out what the past was is really important before deciding what to do to go forward.

And then have clearly defined objectives. I mean, we've talked about this all through the conversation today about having clearly defined objectives. It's your objective is not to restore for the sake of restoration.

Your objective is to restore for something else. So what is that something else? Being clear and transparent about that, not just with yourself, but with others.

And what are you attempting to do? What functions or services are you trying to improve or restore? And then knowing what your starting point is, what's the baseline, which puts some constraints on what you can do and being aware of that.

So what is feasible? And then have a clear idea of what the causal mechanism is that connects the baseline with the future you want. You know, is your intervention really going to make a difference?

Is it going to do what you think it's going to do? And if you can't express that causal mechanism, then you really don't know what you're doing. And then finally, I would say restore for the future, not for the past.

Now, that doesn't mean you ignore the past, or it doesn't mean that the future could look like the past. But don't be so locked into restoring something that was there in the past that it's not going to be there in the future because it's not adapted to future conditions. Wish I had more things to say, but that's all I can come up with.

[Brad Hutnik]

That's fantastic

[Greg Edge]

I think that as we talked about today, you know, foresters need to communicate those clear goals and pathway to the people that come after them, because so much of this is very long-term and developing. And so just a conversation like we had around, you know, what are the terms that we can use to describe this?

What are the processes we can use to think about this? So we get all this maybe down in the prescription that we write. I think it's really useful if foresters can apply that into that everyday work.

[John Stanturf]

I agree. And I think too, that we have to be careful that I guess you would call implicit bias. I have to think, well, am I trying to develop quality timber out there when that's not really my objective?

Some of the ways I would approach intervening in the stand may be colored by that bias, because that's what we've done for all these years as foresters. That's been the objective that society has given us. So now we have a little different one.

So like, you know, one of the applications of that is, this is usually in the tropics where you don't have a lot of guidance on what was there in the past. When you're selecting species, it's not necessarily the timber species that people want. It may be species that have other characteristics like fruiting and seed production or, you know, the right kind of foliage to use in construction for houses or whatever.

So you have to understand what the needs are and what you're really trying to accomplish. And sometimes you can fail to understand that you have these things in your past, your experience and your training that really are not applicable in that instance. So a lot of self-awareness, I guess, is what I'm saying, you know?

[Greg Edge]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. You got a little bit of being humble, right? 

[John Stanturf]

Exactly.

[Greg Edge]

That's great, John. I really appreciate you coming to talk with us today about these topics. And really, I think it'll give foresters something to think about as they're trying to develop this, you know, more at their local level.

Because as we started out today, I think foresters are really restorationists in practice. And that's what silviculture is oftentimes doing. So it really helps us think through these things.

[Brad Hutnik]

I think just this conversation, I think this is a conversation that we've probably been avoiding in forestry for some time, too. Like, we don't really think of ourselves in this context or we're afraid of the conversation because that's just not a place we've often talked. So I think this frees us up to have that conversation.

It puts us in that world, which I think is really good. And it, again, frees us from those bonds of just being a, like, what did you say, Greg? We're from a one-trick pony, you know?

We're not just about this. We can do lots of different things. 

Well, great. Thank you very much, John. 

[Greg Edge]

Yep. Great conversation.

[John Stanturf]

I enjoyed it.

[Greg Edge]

Brad, that was a really good conversation with John. And it got me thinking about silvictionary, for one thing, right?

[Brad Hutnik] 

The silvisaurus.

[Greg Edge]

And something that we have in our silvicultural guidelines, particularly some work that we did on our Northern Hardwood chapter around growing stock classification systems. Yeah. So this is this whole concept of AGS and UGS.

And how that relates to what John was saying about criteria for helping foresters decide what that degraded condition looks like.

[Brad Hutnik]

I like the idea that we integrate stuff into our assessments that really tell us a little bit more about that, like thinking about degradation itself. And Greg, I have to admit, you know, I didn't do that when I was a younger forester.

[Greg Edge]

Well, you didn't do a lot of things.

[Brad Hutnik]

Well, we did a lot. Well, we got a lot done, Greg.

[Greg Edge]

You did a lot of things.

[Brad Hutnik]

We got a lot done. We got a lot done. But when you think about it, like, I remember, like, looking at data and saying, oh, here's a stand with 80 square feet of basal area.

I knew the composition. And I knew that it wasn't right for a thinning. So we just said, well, let it grow.

And we'll come back later on and we'll take a look at it. That's all the data I was looking at. And then having the benefit of being an older forester now.

[Greg Edge]

Much older. 

[Brad Hutnik]

Well, it's older. More a wiser forester is that now I go back and I look at that stand and I go, oh, I didn't think about this the right way because now I had 80 square feet of maybe things that weren't great, right?

A stand that wasn't great. And now I've got 100 square feet of a stand that's not great.

[Greg Edge]

Yeah, it really hasn't changed.

[Brad Hutnik]

Right. It hasn't changed that much. And so putting some of those things into your inventory or into your assessment that do that.

Now, in what we do with the Wisconsin Silviculture Guide in the Northern Hardwood chapter, we talk about a minimum number of acceptable trees or acceptable growing stock or a minimum an amount of it, which I think is a good thing. And I think even just embracing that idea of defining what you're looking at as acceptable growing stock versus unacceptable. To me, that was really big and it made a huge difference in what I do.

[Greg Edge]

And the other thing, because we like to, I guess, gather ideas. The other thing that we've done in the Wisconsin Silviculture Guide is expand growing stock classifications beyond a two-category acceptable growing stock and unacceptable growing stock to really try to define if you want to use a three or even a five classification system if you want lots of detail. But that's what we do.

And we've used some work from Ontario and others to help us define those out. But as long as you have a system for defining that growing stock in some way, and then as you're saying, integrating that into your inventory could have helped you made a better decision back there with that 80 square feet of stand in your early career.

[Brad Hutnik]

Yeah. And I think the caveat too is that it's not telling you, because you collect that information, it doesn't tell you what to do. It informs your decision making based upon it.

So a great example, I think if I were younger or a younger forester, actually me way back in the day, right? If I'd seen unacceptable, I would have said, well, we need to get that unacceptable out of the stands. But because that tree doesn't necessarily have sawlog potential doesn't mean it might not still fit with some of our objectives we have for the stand.

And so to me, it's really it's that piece of the puzzle that you're getting a more full picture of what's actually happening. Then you still have to reflect on objectives and everything else. And I really like, I think some of our more modern objectives now, as opposed to some of the stuff that maybe I started with.

Like simple quality was good, but now maybe thinking more holistically about the forest, I can still use the same information.

[Greg Edge]

Yeah, I think that's an important point. Obviously, as we talked with John, it's tied to objectives, right? But it helps inform that.

And maybe in that situation, maybe you would have decided to start some type of regeneration process in that stand, try to turn over and develop other species and qualities within that stand. So AGS and UGS, that just made me, that conversation made me think of eggs and UGS.

[Brad Hutnik]

Eggs and UGS and more information is always better. Giddy up, words to live by. Well, thanks for listening to today's episode of Silvicast.

If you have ideas for future episodes or a question for the Dropbox, please let us know. You can reach us at UW-Stevens Point's Wisconsin Forestry Center by emailing wfc at uwsp.edu. Feel free to include a sound file of your question or a comment if you like. Remember, we learn best when we wrestle with questions.

So please keep them coming.

[Greg Edge]

And of course, take care, everyone. And as always, thanks to our team. Susan Barrett, our Editor-in-Chief. Joe Rogers, our IT Master. Theme music by Paul Frater. And of course, UW-Stevens Point's Wisconsin Forestry Center.