Maintaining and Restoring Old Growth

It is helpful to think of old growth as a nonrenewable resource within the context of human time scales. As such, it needs more protection, higher valuation, or higher risk assumptions than the classical renewable forest resources (Giles 2000). Restoring old growth to our landscape is mostly a matter of time and protection. Unfortunately, in the southern Appalachians it is likely to take 150 to 400 years for a typical second-growth oak forest to fully achieve old-growth status. Few old-growth forests currently exist in the region. To increase the amount of old-growth, then, clearly requires designating a significant number of existing older forests as future old-growth stands. The challenge is related to identifying at the landscape scale which areas we are going to protect and, once identified, which are going to be managed by passive restoration and which by active restoration.

Planning for more old-growth forests should take place at the landscape scale and apply over centuries. Large areas of old growth are less vulnerable to destruction than small areas. Developing the whole gamut of old-growth characteristics over time is more important than rapidly trying to enhance a few of its elements in isolation. Also, management plans must include considerations for the human use of the area.

In many cases, natural ecological processes and time are all that are required to bring old growth into being. This approach is called passive management. Unfortunately, the impact of past extractive utilization of the forest, climatic change, exotic disturbance agents (e.g. bittersweet, high density deer populations, etc.), and protection from the occurrence of historic disturbance patterns (e.g. wildfire) may make it unlikely that historically representative old growth forests can be restored using passive management alone. In such cases, various active management practices that employ silvicultural treatments, might be attempted.