Ecosystem Management: A Forest Is More Than Sum of Its Parts : Environment: Under new Forest Service policy, preserving biological diversity is the key. The policy also abandons the practice of clear-cutting.

U.S. Forest Service scientists Tom Atzet and Mike Amaranthus were looking at the future of logging in the national forests.

The loggers had already finished their work.

But straight and tall fir trees still reached for the sky, twisted old madrones and oaks filled in between them, and the indigo blossoms of hound’s-tongue dotted the forest floor among rotting logs and young pine and fir.

The logging plan for this piece of the Siskiyou National Forest represents the newest buzzword in the Northwest woods: ecosystem management.

“The emphasis is on what we are going to leave,” said Amaranthus, who specializes in ecosystem research.

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“In previous decades,” he added, “it’s been on what can we take. It’s a whole different approach to forestry.”

It’s not a new idea to manage natural resources based on the impact on the entire ecosystem. It goes back to naturalist Aldo Leopold’s first law of tinkering: Don’t throw away the pieces.

Calling an end to the era of the clear-cut, the Forest Service last year embraced the concept of ecosystem management. To further define the term, the Ecological Society of America is gathering 10 scientists under the leadership of Norm Christensen, dean of the Duke University School of the Environment.

The team’s report, due in late July, is intended to give the Forest Service and other agencies benchmarks for judging whether they are actually doing ecosystem management.

“The decision at this point by the public agencies to move in this direction is indeed a watershed decision,” Christensen said in a telephone interview from Durham, N.C.

“The last 20 years in particular have been a real wake-up call for humans as we have realized the tremendous impact we have had on the planet,” he added.

“The increase in carbon dioxide, changes in the ozone layer, the impoverishment of biodiversity--all these things have started to hit us as we realize there really are limitations out there.”

Atzet, a regional ecologist for the Forest Service, compares ecosystem management to a library, where the shelves are the geology, the climate and the orientation of the mountains, and where the books are the plants and animals.

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The Klamath Bioregion, which embraces the Siskiyou and Klamath mountains in southwestern Oregon, is the only “library” in the Pacific Northwest that hasn’t lost any of its books to erupting volcanoes or grinding glaciers.

“We can harvest some of the romance novels, but we have to keep the Shakespeare,” Atzet said.

Before World War II, the Forest Service looked at the woods in broad terms that included trees, animals and water, said David Perry, professor of ecosystem studies at Oregon State University.

But when the war ended, “Many things changed in the basic economy, from agriculture to forestry,” he said.

“We began to focus on producing crops. Then other things that are part of the forest ecosystem began to fall through the cracks,” Perry added.

Among them was the northern spotted owl, which is in danger of becoming extinct because too much of its old-growth forest habitat has been logged to make way for tree plantations.

Lawsuits brought by environmentalists to preserve habitat for the owl have brought logging in old-growth areas to a standstill until the Forest Service devises a plan to assure that the owl won’t die out.

Andy Stahl, Seattle-based forester for the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund, says he views ecosystem management as a ploy to let the Forest Service get back to business as usual, logging the last of the old growth.

“I really don’t believe in forest management by sound bite,” he said.

But Jerry Franklin, a University of Washington forestry professor who coined the term “new forestry,” likes the new description.

Ecosystem management “simply recognizes, finally, that you can’t look at this stuff a piece at a time. If you do, you get bit,” Franklin said in a telephone interview from Portland, Ore.

That need to consider whole ecosystems, rather than cutting them up into wilderness, wildlife habitat and industrial forest, is changing the very nature of the politics and bureaucracies that govern the land.

Perry and Amaranthus view ecosystem management as being used to thin out crowded second-growth forests and to create the biological diversity and structure found in old growth.

In that scenario, downed logs return fertility to the soil, serve as water reservoirs during drought and offer a safe place to sleep for salamanders. Standing dead trees harbor insects that pileated woodpeckers eat. The holes the woodpeckers drill into the snags become nests for swallows.

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Meanwhile, small openings let sunlight into the forest while oak and madrone help check the spread of wildfire.

“What you end up with is a much more ecologically complex stand producing a variety of resources that is aesthetically pleasing and better habitat,” Amaranthus said.

“Don’t you get the feeling,” he asked, “that if we would have managed stands and landscapes like this beginning 30 years ago, we wouldn’t be in the courts today?”