A forgotten 30-year forest experiment suggests strategic thinning could produce bigger trees while supporting carbon storage, wildlife, and timber production. Credit: Centre for Forest Tree Technology
What’s the best way to manage a forest? Australians have argued about this for decades. The debate is often framed as binary: do we protect forests entirely, or harvest trees to support local economies and communities?
The reality is more interesting, as our new research on a long-forgotten experiment in Victoria’s mountain ash forests reveals.
Since the 1970s, scientists and the public have questioned the use of clearfell logging – where all trees in a block of forest are cut down. Conservationists argued it destroys habitat for rare species and reduces the forests’ ecological value. Foresters said mountain ash is adapted to catastrophic bushfires, and clearfelling is the forestry equivalent.
