Trees like Western Redcedars form candelabra crowns with complex spaces that allow for other plant species to grow, providing food and habitat to those in the forest. Once they get to be thousands of years old, they can form splits and cavities for different animals to burrow and den in, and when they die and fall over, a new generation of trees grow on them as nurse logs, their roots wrapping around the fallen tree which eventually decays to leave behind complex root structures. All this is the result of thousands and thousands of years of development.
When forests are industrially logged, they are clearcut to maximize profits above all other values, and all those complexities that took thousands of years to develop are destroyed. While clearcuts are often regarded as necessary foraging grounds for birds or elk, this is only a short window in the succession of these forests and these species still require healthy mature forests nearby for sheltering habitat.
The secondgrowth forest that follows is comprised of younger, straight growing trees that lack the same complexity in both habitat and food sources, and thus, biodiversity is severely reduced here.
By ecologically thinning these secondgrowth forests created by industrial logging, we open up the canopy to allow light to come in so that species can fill out the understory, while leaving fallen logs and standing dead snags provides woody debris that can serve as home to wildlife as it decays.
While it is no substitute for leaving complex mature forests standing, and it will still take centuries to millennia for some of these structures to form again, ecological restoration like this helps speed up the successional processes of these forests to create oldgrowth characteristics and allow opportunities for the forest to develop in a manner that supports a wide range of biodiversity so that they can survive the impacts of anthropogenic climate change, and create a better future for us all.
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