I wrote this post for the Ashland Forest Resiliency Blog to explain how we use ecological forest thinning to set the stage for restoring a natural fire regime to the forests of Ashland.
Our last post explained why ecological thinning (what foresters call commercial density management) is necessary for forest restoration and wildfire hazard reduction in the Ashland Watershed. In this post we want to show you how one thinning method works. After trees have been marked by Lomakatsi technicians and selectively cut, they need to be extracted from the forest, a process called yarding. AFR employs two yarding methods: helicopter and ground-based, which we’ve been working on this year. Here’s a quick overview of what ground-based yarding entails:
