 This is sponsored by the Blue Mountains Natural Resources Institute. It's also sponsored by the Umatel National Forest, the Wasco County Soil and Water Conservation District, Union Soil and Water Conservation District, and Eastern Oregon State College. My name is Bill Malarkey. I'm the coordinator for the seminar series. And with me is Jim McKeever, our co-host for the seminar series. Jim is the director of the Learning Center of the Blue Mountains Natural Resources Institute. And Jim is going to explain a little bit about the seminar series that we're about to see. Thanks, Bill. The Blue Mountains Institute does these seminar series to try to take the information that we have out there that is somewhat obscure in some cases and get it out there so the maximum audience can see it. This is the fourth seminar series that we have done in the last two years. This one on soils. This evening we begin with soil structure and function by Al Harvey. I'll introduce him in just a bit. Next week we'll continue with looking at soil development. We'll talk about the geology of soils, what the relation is between geology and soils, and also the organic and inorganic soil formation. On the 20th of October, our third session, we'll look at the organisms of the soil. We'll look at the bacteria, the fungi, the protozoa, nematodes, and arthropods that contribute to soil function. On the 27th, the fourth and final evening, we'll look at soil management, the effects of management activities out for soils, and can we manage better? We also have a field trip plan in the 22nd of October that I think Bill is going to tell you about in more depth later. This field trip is open to anybody who wants to come. That's the 22nd of October. That's about it for the series. I'll introduce Al Harvey just after Bill takes care of some housekeeping. Some of the things that I want to be sure that you'll understand is that we do have sign-up sheets as we've had in the past. It's really important for you folks to sign those here and at the remote sites as well. We keep a record of the attendance, and we also get the people on the mailing list that aren't there already. Another thing that we've got are handouts in the back of the room and at all the remote sites. Some of our handouts are of limited numbers, so be sure and want those. Take those if you can really use those. One example is the soil survey that we've got from the Union County. If you can see that on our overhead projector, every county has a soil survey, and you can get that from your local SCS office or Soil and Water Conservation District office. Those are at each site as well, just one example. We've also got some posters that would really be good for teachers to take, so if we have teachers in the audience, be sure and pick one of those up. We've also got several copies of a publication that was Al Harvey was the principal author and one of our local men, Mike Geist, is a co-author in that paper, and Robert Marise, who is our final speaker, is an author of the paper, and it's Biotic and Abiotic Processes in Eastside Ecosystems. We've got several copies of that, so again, pick those up if you really want to learn more in depth about what we're talking about. Very good publications. Another thing we are offering college credit through Eastern Oregon State College again this year or this series, and be sure and pick up your registration forms, and when you make out your checks, make those payable to Eastern Oregon State College and send those to the Learning Center here in LeGrand, and the address is 10901 Island Avenue in LeGrand. We'll keep you posted on that if you have any questions later. As far as the requirements for the course, it's a critique or a summary of each presentation about two paragraphs, and then for the people that are relatively close, like in Baker City, Enterprise, and Pendleton, we definitely want to have you attend the tour on the 22nd, and for those people that can't possibly make it, we're going to select a reporter publication on Soils and have you write a critique on that publication, and we'll have that to the people that sign up by the 13th or the 22nd. Another thing that we're going to have again available this time is the videotape series. They were very popular last time, particularly for those people that couldn't get to a remote site to see the series, and they'll be offered for $30 this time. It's a little increased from last time, but Eastern Oregon State College is handling that, and they couldn't afford to do it for $20. For those of you folks that aren't at the established remote sites, and we know that there are some, we would like to have the people in the Forest Service jot us a note on their data general systems and let us know where you're receiving it. There could be people from out of state, as far as Montana, receiving the seminar series. We're delighted to have you, and if we know you're out there, we could get some information to you. So, the other people that don't have the data general system could just jot us a note at the learning center. The format for this evening is we have about 40 to 45 minutes that our speaker will present his information, and then we'll take questions and answers. We're not going to take an official break, but if you really need to take a break, and that's a long time to sit in one spot, do it fairly discreetly. And for the people at remote sites, I don't know if you leave or not, so just, you know, have at it. And while you're listening to our speaker, write down your questions, so you don't forget those. One of the things that we'll have difficulty, or we've had difficulty with at EdNet One, remote sites, is getting people to ask questions. And you have an audio bridge, all you need to do is push the button, and you can talk directly to our presenter and ask him those questions. The people from Walla Walla can call the direct line and those numbers will be posted when that is available for you to do. I believe that's about all I've got to say here, but we're going to have a good series, and Jim's going to introduce our speaker, and we'll get rolling. Okay, Alan Harvey is with us tonight. He is a plant pathologist for the USDA Forest Service, the Intermountain Research Station in Moscow, Idaho. His current work deals with ecosystem processes, microbial functions, and forest health. He has gone to several schools and been trained at several institutions, the College of Idaho, the University of Idaho, and he received his PhD from Washington State University in 1967. Since 1965, he's been with the Forest Service at various labs, primarily Missoula and in Moscow, and he's worked on all sorts of things associated with soils. The title of his presentation tonight is Soil and the Forest Floor, What it is and how it works. Please welcome Alan Harvey. Thanks, guys. Okay, what I want to do is get started right away with the slide series, and we'll go through a slideshow, and this stuff tends to be a little information dense, guys, so you have to be sort of on your toes. Don't worry about specific numbers as we go through. Look at trends. The relative value is one thing to another. Specific numbers aren't very important. Most of the time, when they are, I'll discuss them specifically. So if we can get started with the first slide. See, I need to be able to see those slides. Can I pull this? Got it. Okay. Hey, here we go. All right, lots of technology. I want to call your attention first and foremost. Look at this. We've already discussed what the title is. Down at the lower right-hand corner there, I make mention that forest soils develop in place. That is something that's very, very unique with soils, particularly in forests. They're not like agricultural soils at all. Forest soils, most of them, rarely get physically displaced. They're not plowed. They very seldom move from one place to the other. There are a few forests where tip overs, tree tip overs, does a pretty fair job of plowing soils. But that's rare, particularly in the inland northwest. So I want to just emphasize that with these title slides. So first of all, let's talk about what a soil is and a rough sense, a simplistic sense, if you will. Before I get into the real organic matter business that we're slated to talk about tonight, though I want to call your attention to the fact that the physical process of what goes on beneath the forest floor is very, very important. This happens to be one of the nicest soil profiles, one of the more interesting soil profiles I've ever run across. Starting at the top, you can see some glacial till of an old soil profile. Below that, you have two ash falls. In between, there's a black layer. That was once a forest. The second ash fall there eliminated that forest. And then below there, glacial till again. It's a rather interesting profile. What's more interesting about it is if you look around the backside of that hill, where you have volcanic ash, you have Douglas fir and white fir. Where you don't, you have lodgepole pine and bonderosa pine. And this is just a good example of what can happen below that forest floor that I'm going to spend most of my time talking about. Forest soils are very complicated animals, and it is well not to forget that. And when I'm through, I will be presenting something that's relatively simplistic, as I say, but these soils are highly variable. They can be a whole different ball game just several feet away. So it's very difficult working with soils from the standpoint of sampling because variation is extremely high. By and large, in inland western forest soils, they're very shallow. They're relatively infertile. You see the organic horizon. Here's only a couple inches thick. That is characteristic of most of the inland northwest. When we take soil samples, this is what we generally see in terms of horizons. Starting at the top, you have the litter underlain by humus with scattered decomposed wood throughout the soil profile, both laying on top of and incorporated in. This is something when we first began to look, we were quite surprised by. But there are very substantial volumes of this stuff in most of our inland western forest soils. You hear a lot of terminology being bantered around in forest soil science, and it's real easy to get lost in it sometimes. So I generated this computer graphic, and I had little problems with one computer talking to another here, but it still serves the purpose pretty well. There's a number of names that you hear kicked around. Forest floor is what we're talking about here primarily. So the forest floor we're talking about includes four principal layers. The litter, the fermentation layer of the litter, which is advanced decomposed. Litter beginning to decompose, it kind of sticks together. It's starting to lose its descriptive nature. Underlain by the humus. Humus is well decomposed organic matter mixed with mineral soil at about a 50-50 basis. Now, from the standpoint of the sampling that we've done in terms of what we see that's interesting in forest mineral soil horizons, and you'll hear a lot more about mineral soils from other people, but the most interesting things that we find go on in the shallow mineral soil, that's mineral soil down to 30 centimeters of depth, and that can be broken apart into two different layers. The upper two inches or five centimeters of it is pretty well enriched by organic material that percolates down from the forest floor above. So it's rather unique in that it has relatively high content of organic matter as opposed to the rest of the mineral profile, which has very little. Scattered throughout again, advanced decomposed woody materials laying on, sometimes incorporated, even deeply incorporated into these forest soils. Each has a function. And remember that all this put together is only a few inches deep in most of our soil, so it's very shallow. It's very easy to disturb. It's very easy to burn up with hot fires. It's very sensitive, shall we say. How is moisture distributed in this soil profile? Well, immediately you can see, and you can imagine the decomposed wood in a soil profile holds a great deal of moisture. All organic materials hold a great deal of moisture. They have high pore volume. They tend to hold a lot of moisture, as opposed to the mineral soil horizons. Available nitrogen. Again, the organic materials tend to hold most of the available nitrogen. Most of the available nitrogen that is there is derived from decomposed organic matter. So that's where we would expect to find it. There's an additional factor that happens with decomposed wood that we'll get into later. But with respect to, in this case, nitrate, which is water soluble and available, always highest in the wood. Ammonia, again, always highest in the wood. So these organic horizons, and specifically that wood, tends to be a very rich source of moisture and nitrogen. Some unique things happen with acidity, pH. A lot of forest soil microbes tend to enjoy, shall we say, relatively acid conditions. And by far and away, the most acid condition in most of our forest soils in this region, again, is soil wood. So it tends to have high resource value. It tends to have the right habitat situations for a lot of soil microbial activity. Age-wise, it takes a long time to get wood in the soil. These are just some simple carbon-14 dates that we ran. We made no attempt here to look for really old stuff. This was a relatively small sample, and we did find material commonly in the soil over 500 years old. If we had specifically looked for old stuff, we probably would have found some in the age class of around 1,000 years, maybe even a little more, especially on stable soils on relatively even slopes where you don't have downslope movement. So once it's in this soil, it tends to stay there. Another interesting thing about this stuff is there's certain species that tend to be much more persistent than the other. Pines, larches, and especially Douglas fir, decompose largely to what we call a brown rot system. Brown rotted wood tends to be extremely persistent in soils because it has a very high lignin content, which is very recalcitrant from the standpoint of decomposition. So it's super persistent in soil. So when it comes to generating this stuff, not just any kind of wood will produce the kind of wood we'd like to have sometimes in our forest soils. It's sometimes species specific. We've had a look about what is it a little bit now in terms of its physical nature. Let's take a look at how it works. First of all, this is some older research dating back to 1963. It was largely ignored for a very long period of time. This was a nursery type work where they planted spruce in various kinds of substrates and then measured how the roots grew within it. Now at that time, in 1963, there was a great deal of interest from the standpoint of reforestation in the fact that you had to have mineral soil to get regeneration because with a lot of species, you do have to have mineral soil. But with a lot of species, you don't. And consequently, as I say, this work was largely overlooked. But by the time I get through showing you the next several slides, I think you'll see that these guys were right on the money. And it was basically overlooked for almost 20 years. Since this was a simulated experiment, I think everybody assumed that this was not a natural situation and therefore it didn't reflect what we'd find in nature. Okay. To give you a feeling for how the organic horizons might affect growth, what we've done here is just take spruce seedlings again. Since Day and Duffy used spruce, we'll just use spruce in this case to give you a feeling. Now, spruce is basically a climax species, of course. It does tend to grow in cool systems that have a lot of organic matter in it. You would expect it to be highly responsive to organic matter. And indeed it is. So with young spruce, you get a direct line relationship, very high correlation between organic matter depth and growth in terms of seedling weight. Now, what I want to do is take a look at some microbial processes functionally. There's two processes that are very important, critical to the way trees grow. Mycorrhiza, because they tend to help provide moisture, phosphate, and nitrogen to a substantial degree to coniferous plants. It happens to be a rather unique kind of a situation where you have a symbiosis between a fungus and a tree where the tree normally grows in infertile situations. So this is sort of a hedge. It provides some carbohydrate in return. The fungus provides nutrients from the soil. And you'll hear a lot more about that in a presentation later. But needless to say, this is a very critical process from the standpoint of growth of most higher plants, but particularly conifers and infertile soils. When we correlate the amount of mycorrhizal activity with the base productivity of a forest site, again, you see there's a very straight line relationship here. So this would confirm that you would expect that anything that would have this close of correlation between growth might have very critical function in that system. Okay, now let's just take a look. We took a look at the total number a little while ago compared to productivity potential. Now let's take a look at where they are in terms of those horizons. And you can see that they tend to be concentrated in the organic horizons. Now on the left in this particular slide, it shows you what the soil looks like. In other words, we took a sample here and these were random samples. And so we just took a look at what the soil looks like and on the right we showed you where the mycorrhizal were in those soils. And basically what it says is this is 95% of the mycorrhizal activity in this stand and this is a mid slope northern Rocky Mountain subalpine fur type ecosystem, 95% of the mycorrhiza during peak growth of that stand which is in June and July occurred in organic horizons. And that's pretty telling. And we were surprised to see that. We expected it to be important. We didn't really expect it to be that important. And basically we spent the next 20 years trying to shoot holes in this kind of a relationship and we have not been able to. Everything we've discovered since indicates that these organic horizons are just extremely critical for these microbial processes that tend to drive growth. Let's track that through a season now. Starting in the winter there, January, February moving through again the peak growth period which is May, June, early July. Into the fall things start to dry out, right? Cooling off then in the winter again. If you look at the portion that is supported by decomposed wood as you move from the moist season to the dry one you see a trend, right? As you, as a drought, an onset of drought occurs in July and August you see wood supporting a much greater portion of the micro-isable activity that occurs there. That suggests there might be something going on, right? So when we take a look at the dry season specifically and look across three different habitat types the one on the right is quite a dry one. That's the Douglas Furter, Meinbart, in western Montana. You see it's extremely important to late season growth on those sites as determined by mycorrhiza. So this is the dry season of a dry site. So the moisture relationships here are extremely important to this process. Now let's look across a whole group of ecosystems. Same basis. Take a look at where the mycorrhiza occur. As you go from left to right you're going from very productive ecosystems western white pine, subalpine fir, western hemlock to some a little less so. Much more harsh types of ecosystems. Douglas Furter, Grand Fur, Ponderosa Pine. Even in the very dry system you find organic matter is probably driving the system. Look how important in the Ponderosa Pine site that first few centimeters of mineral soil that's enriched by organic matter becomes. What's happening here of course is it's so dry in these systems that even the organic matter is very dry, very early in the seasons. Very early in the season. Then as you get rare though they may be rainfall events during the course of the season there's not enough water to rewet them. So that water tends to percolate right through the organic horizons and be deposited in the shallow mineral horizon which then becomes the hot bit of activity as it were. But in any case across all these ecosystems you have the organic horizons really driving this process. Take a look at some disturbed ones now. Even in disturbed ecosystems we find this is true. Starting on the left mixed species, poleage stands, Ponderosa Pine poleage stand, Lodge pole pine poleage stand, Douglas fir poleage stand. These were disturbed but not excessively so when they were reforested. We could tell by the soil samples that we took and it will take a little closer look at that later. They had been disturbed but not destructively so. Now the two ecosystems on the right there these are younger ones, they're 12 to 15 years old one's Lodge pole pine, one's western larch. Both of these were pretty substantially disturbed. The one on the far right was hammered. That was western larch. They were trying to regenerate western larch and it's been known for a very long time that the only way to get western larch seed to successfully germinate is with mineral soil and they got it. This site was badly hurt from the standpoint of long-term productive because they virtually destroyed the organic horizon and we'll take a little look at this later and get a feeling for that. Now let's take another look at regeneration. This is regeneration under old growth in other words stuff that's beginning to come up as the old growth stand is breaking up. So they're competing with the old growth for available moisture. It's very dry in these systems. It's a real tough place for seedling to make a living. And again you can see the relative importance of wood goes up as you get to the dry system and the importance of organic matter in general through all three from the standpoint of supporting the root systems and the micro eyes on them. Now the analytical look at those disturbed sites I was looking at earlier. Take a look at the bar on the left and get a feeling for the colored part colored section of the bar there. You can see it's what? It's maybe 12, 13, 14% height of that bar. This is a 52-year-old lodgepole pine site. This is a Poloage stand of lodgepole pine that we looked at earlier. The average soil, bar is on the left that's what the soil looks like and on the right that's where the micro eyes are. Same story. This was site prepared but it was not hammered. It wasn't stirred to the point that the organic horizons had been utterly destroyed. This is a 16-year-old western lodge site. Again, you can see this was site prepared and we were losing some of that organic matter there on the left. It's down to maybe 10%. But still, we have most of the micro eyes being supported in that horizon. This is lodgepole pine and this one was as the one large stand we looked at earlier. This was hammered. They really wanted to prepare this site and this was considered good forestry 25 years ago. They did get a lot of regeneration this way. What they didn't realize was it didn't do very well. You got good establishment but it didn't do very well thereafter. In any case, you can see what's happened to the organic horizon. Despite that, you can see how important it was for the micro eyes and for the stand that got started there. So it doesn't matter whether we're dealing with old growth stands or intermediate age stands or regeneration or site prepared. It doesn't seem to matter much what we did with these sites. Those organic horizons are extremely important to micro eyes and activities which in turn are critical for growth and survival. We took a look earlier at what we might expect with spruce looking at the growth of the relationship between organic matter and growth. Now I'm going to take a look at ponderosa pine. This is a species that normally grows in very low organic matter environments. And now we're going to take a look at the mycorrhiza that occur only in the organic horizon. We're going to correlate that with growth. We see we get a nice positive correlation. Now we're going to do the same thing with the same seedlings and look at only the mycorrhiza that occurred in the mineral soil. We get a nice negative relationship. So that gives you a pretty good feeling for how important the organic matter is to provide the things that the mycorrhiza in turn provide to the tree. In the absence of that organic horizon we get a strong negative relationship. It does take a fair amount of carbohydrate produced by the tree, a fair amount of food stuff provided by that tree to support those mycorrhiza. And if they're not returning something in kind pretty prolifically it's kind of like a waste of energy. So you can have very strong negative relationships between growth and mycorrhiza if the soil doesn't have what it needs for the mycorrhiza to do their thing appropriately. Let's take a look at another process now. There's two ways, three ways you can get nitrogen into a forest soil. One of them is through air pollution or rainfall. In some cases like most of the northern Iraqis, most of this country, you don't get very much that way. On the other hand, in eastern forests they get more nitrogen than they can stand because of air pollution and rainfall input. But we don't hear. Okay, so that's one source. Relatively low on here, quite low on here actually. Now there's two microbial based processes that also input nitrogen. One of them is symbiotic nitrogen fixation and that is nodulated plants that have bacteria in the roots that fix nitrogen and they do that with energy supplied by the plant. Like alfalfa, okay? We have a whole group of those that occur in forest ecosystems. Unfortunately, we don't find very many of them very often in most of our ecosystems. The other process is what through non-symbiotic nitrogen fixation which is free living bacteria which is what we're looking at here, free living nitrogen fixers that are using energy from the organic matter in the soil to fix nitrogen. Okay, so they just occur in the soil. They're scarfing up basically integer materials leaking from the soil from the decomposition of soil organic horizons to fix nitrogen. In most cases, we largely depend on this process in most of the inland northwestern soils. This is the same type of a correlation we drew with mycorrhiza earlier. We're just correlating the amount of activity to yield capacity of the site. Very nice, strong, straight line correlation. Again, if we look at where it occurs, we also get a similar thing but now the bar on the far right is a little different kind of a bar than I showed you earlier. This is a decayed log knot in the soil laying suspended on the soil. You know the one that's laying there, it has some shelf fungi, you know, it's in a fairly advanced stage decomposition. You could probably walk up with your boot and fetch it a kick and kick a big piece out of it and wouldn't break your toe. That is a veritable nitrogen sponge compared to most other situations in that soil. It's really what we refer to as a nitrogen pump. Okay, another set of bars getting at the same sort of thing we did earlier with mycorrhiza. We're going from a moist to a dry ecosystem. In the dry ecosystem, again, you see the increasing importance of wood. This happens to be wood in the soil rather than on the soil. Same type of thing we looked at with mycorrhiza. So these two critical processes that really drive growth and survival of trees in these soils behaving exactly the same way with regard to the various types of organic components that are in those soils. Now this will give you a feeling for where nitrogen is stored and where the fixation capacity would be if you would remove it. And of course you see that the both are again concentrated in these organic horizons. Douglas first site. First set of bars on the left. That's where it's stored. Second set of bars. That's where it's fixed. A third set of bars, it's a western hemlock site. That's where it's stored. And the second set of bars where it's fixed. So storage and fixation are occurring in very much the same places. Relative effectiveness of the two processes. Okay. If we have symbiotic plants on the site in sufficient numbers that they're doing their thing, they can pump a great deal more nitrogen than non-symbiotic sources or aerosol inputs, rainfall inputs. So when you have plants like cyanophis and alder, they can really put a lot of nitrogen in the system compared to any other way of getting it there, other than physically putting it there, fertilizing. So you can see with the alder there, that's the red bar in a far right, that would be an 80 to 100% canopy coverage of alder. That's 100 times more effective than all of the components that could be put together from non-symbiotic. Okay. And with the cyanophis there, that's about a 25% canopy coverage. So it's five times more effective. But most of the time we simply don't have it. This is some data from the habitat type books. And what you have here is two different types of climax types, two different habitat types, Douglas fir and Grand fir. And what we have, if you start with the first one under alder there, allness, out of 755 stands sampled, and Douglas fir, okay, one of them had some alder on it. These are mid-slope 70-plus-year-old stands that they use for habitat typing. So on that basis, in the Grand fir series, the best situation we had was 17 of 114 stands sampled, had cyanophis on them. The other thing that's unfortunate, and when we take a look at this, is the canopy coverage is very poor. So they don't tend to occur often, and they don't tend to occur in very heavy numbers. So they're not very dependable as a source of nitrogen. In Douglas fir, we found lupin. 755 stands, only 25 of them had, 29 of them had lupin in them. So this sort of gives you a feeling of, even though this is the process we might like to have on the site, and it would be very effective, a lot of times we don't have it. And historically, a lot of times when we did have it, we fought it, because it was seen as competition. Okay, now let's take a look at how it works, or excuse me, how to treat it. See if we can get some feeling for how we might manage, and what the repercussions might be if we didn't. This is using mycorrhiza as a bioindicator of how much organic matter we might like to see. The series of green bars in the back there are our wet system, series of red bars on the dry system. What we're doing is stepping through organic matter content starting at 15, 30, 45, and 45 plus percent of the top 12 inches of soil. And what you see is the green set and the yellow set definitely peak and drop off. In fact, the red one didn't. Even though that last bar, the 45 plus bar is a little lower than the 45 bar, statistically it wasn't significant because it occurred so rarely. But in any case, we have used this as a basis for saying that at least we're driving the mycorrhizal process as concern that if we could shoot for managing at least as much as gave us that peak in activity, we could say that at least with this process we're probably leaving enough on the site to provide for adequate mycorrhizal activity. And it turns out after a bunch of mechanical calculations to figure out what it takes to do that, that turned out to be about 10 to 15 tons per acre, which isn't a great deal. So for many years we based our recommendation for most of the inland northwest as 10 to 15 tons per acre of relatively large woody residue post harvest with a minimum of soil disturbance and destruction of what was there before we went in as something that we felt was a pretty good target and that we could scientifically justify. We've done some follow-up on this work. Russ Graham just completed the publication where we have had field crews out for a number of years looking at a wide variety of ecosystems and taking a look at the same type of thing. And this shows you the range of variation they found. This goes everywhere from the southwest to almost the Pacific Northwest. And if you look at the two vertical blue bars there, that's the 10 to 15 tons I was talking about earlier there. So you can see that we came out in pretty much the same ballpark with a couple exceptions. The Western Hemlock Quintonia, old growth systems tended to have a lot more. The Grand Furacer tended to have a lot less. Most of the rest fell pretty much in that same range. Our national forest people were really interested in having a habitat type by habitat type look at this. And so that's what this was designed to do. But the 10 to 15 ton still looks pretty good. And what we generally say now is if you take the 10 to 15 tons as your minimum, maybe try to produce a bit more than that, recognizing that if you get too much, you create a fire hazard. And if you get too much fuel on the ground and you get a fire in it at the wrong time, it's extremely dangerous. And I'll take a look at that too. Our fire people tell us about 60 tons per acre is where you start getting to the point that you really are creating a fire hazard. So this sort of gives you a broad scope of what one might want to do in terms of managing soil organic matter and the parent materials that create it. I think you can use a fairly wide base of variation. One thing you can say, I think, is you can't expect real dry ecosystems that don't accumulate or that shouldn't accumulate large volumes of woody materials and organic horizons to produce high volumes. So you don't try to make a ponderosa pine site look like a western hemlock site. I think that probably would be self-defeating. In fact, one of the problems that we have with this data right now is, of course, these happen to be old growth systems. And using old growth as sort of the control, unfortunately right now most of our old growth systems are a bit heavy in the organic matters and fuels. So you have to kind of bear that in mind that most of these are fuel-laden right now and probably should not be. But it does give you sort of a feeling for what you might do in terms of this sort of thing. Now, if we start playing around with a system in terms of, for example, site preparation, what are the ramifications? And this goes through the ramifications of what might happen with respect to nitrogen. This is so-called mineralizable nitrogen, which is combined ammonium and nitrate. And if you look in the mineral soil, and we have no disturbance, moderate scarification, no scarification, real heavy scarification. Okay, somewhat like the site with the lodgepole pine in Western Larch I showed you earlier. Look what happens with the organic horizon and what happens with the, we can get an 80% loss of the soil nitrogen stores in that system. And soil and nitrogen is an absolute requirement for growth. So overzealous site preparation is not a very good idea. Same situation with fire. Undisturbed, severe burn, no burn, slight burn, extreme burn. Now, this extreme burn is really hot. This is hot enough to change color of the soil. Okay? Even a severe burn, you get 90%, more than 90% loss of nitrogen. So heavy fuel on the ground type wildfires are extremely dangerous in the standpoint of nitrogen and long-term productivity. Devastating, ramifications. Now this, I think this slide really tells the story. In the blue-green there is storage capacity. And we took a look at that in one of the slides earlier. Okay? And the white is the fixation capacity. Alright? Now if we say that we lost virtually all of the nitrogen in this system that was stored in the organic horizons, okay? That's 1,468 kilograms lost. Then we say, with the fixation capacity that we have left, how long would it take to get that system back in production? Well, for the calculation I made there, I made an assumption. We had some C in office. Okay? Maybe 10%, 12% canopy coverage. We had it scattering a little bit C in office in this system. We add up the fixation capacity. See how long it takes? Well, it takes 108 years to get that system back to where it was before. Now, if we didn't have the C in office, it would take three, four, maybe five times. Okay? That's spooky. So I think it does one well to take care of the organic horizons and the nitrogen and mycorrhizans that they support. Or you're very likely to impair long-term productivity. And unfortunately, we have discovered that getting nitrogen back into that system is not as simple as just taking it back in there and throwing it on in terms of fertilizing. That doesn't seem to work very well with many of our ecosystems, perhaps most of them in the in the Northwest. This works only in small amounts. And because when you start, for some reason, artificially applied nitrogen changes the physiology of the trees and makes them do things that they ordinarily wouldn't do. It sends bad signals to the system that, number one, controls top growth, the bottom growth. If you start putting a lot of nitrogen on the soil, the plants think they have it good. So they start building big tops and they don't build root systems to support it. I guess because physiologically they don't think they need to. They also tend to lose some of the phenolic compounds. They don't produce some of the phenolic compounds that are very important for defense. So they tend to become stressed. They lose some of their defensive capability and they become highly susceptible to a number of insects and diseases. So balancing this system artificially is very, looks like it's going to be a very difficult thing. So it's best to keep them as natural as you can. I guess you could summarize what to do very easily. It's not so easily accomplished, obviously. Erosion takes all that stuff out of the system. Compaction renders it unworkable. Outright loss, again, is a problem. Even if you mix it in the soil like plowing it in, instead of having horizons, you change the whole ecology of the system. Wood does not act like wood unless it comes in large chunks. As a large chunk, it becomes what we refer to as a perched water table. It's like sitting there a large chunk of water being held in an environment that has a particular acid base. It's a situation that, coincidentally, conifer tree roots seem to like. And non-conifers don't. That's another interesting thing I might mention. If you go out and take a look at the root systems that occur in old decomposing wood in forest soils, you'll find a lot of conifer roots, very few herbaceous roots. So apparently that acid high phenolic lignin matrix that is old wood, conifers have learned how to deal with and certain microbes have learned how to deal with and many others have not. So it is a very unique and very important substrate in forest soils. And then always to remember that in dealing with the forest floor, these organic horizons, they are very shallow and highly subject to damage. 35, 30 years ago, we were doing, I think, in forestry a very poor job of managing forest soil horizons. I think for the last 10 or 15 years we've been doing a fairly good job in most cases. And you will see, I think, in most of the inland northwest that most forest harvest operations in most forest districts that I'm familiar with are doing a pretty respectable job these days. There are still some that are not very sensitized to this sort of thing, but not many. We've come a long way in forest soil management, particularly in the last 10 years. I think that's the size of what I've got here other than to perhaps drive home some points. I don't see much of this kind of forestry anymore. I don't like to see this kind of forest. If you come back 25 years later, what you'll find is large trees growing around the edges of that windrow, small trees growing everywhere else. They did that with the cat. And of course it was for good reason. This happens to be Eastside Rocky Mountains and they have a lot of problems with excess fuel accumulation and it's very difficult to deal with. There's too much there to broadcast burn because it's a problem keeping control of it. That's how they try to windrow it. If they do a really good job of windrowing it, they've done a real poor job of forestry. They're getting a lot better I think now about doing a lousy job of windrowing it, leaving a lot of stuff scattered around, burning only what they have to burn to get that fuel level down. Again, I just came back from a pretty extensive trip in Canada and I see in a lot of the provincial forests they haven't got the message up there yet. In southern B.C. they're doing a pretty good job. In northern B.C. you see an awful lot of this kind of thing yet. This is an example of what was done 35 years ago in the Bitterroot Mountains. I don't know if any of you remember. They brewed ha-ha from there. What it amounted to is in Idaho Betheliff Country they discovered that terracing worked very, very well under some circumstances to grow ponderosa pine. So they tried to transfer the method to some other kinds of soils. If you look really closely in that slide and I don't think you can see it electronically, you can see a very small, tiny green spots in the middle of those terraces. That was Douglas fir. They tried to use Douglas fir in, as they say, a different soil. And you can see that where they didn't site to prepare the forest is doing a great deal better. And of course Douglas fir happens to be a species that's highly sensitive to organic matter. Ponderosa pine perhaps a little bit less so. But it was a really bad idea. It sounded good at the time and its experience. And this sort of thing, this is one of Jim Brown's shots of the Yellowstone fire. When we get really hot fires, they really can do a lot of damage. One of our problems in dealing with the issue of forest health right now is to defuel some of our highly sensitive ecosystems. And I think it's something that's a real good idea if it's appropriately done. Of course it could be inappropriately done, but if it's appropriately done, I think it's a real good idea. A lot of these fires are doing a lot of damage because a lot of them now have tremendous amount of fuels down, large fuels down on the ground. So you get high temperatures, high retention times, and a lot of damage. I think that pretty much sums it up. I'll be glad to take questions. When the logs are on the ground and burn and they get a carbon surface, do they behave the same as the logs that don't have that surface? Yes, that's something we've considered quite a lot. What we've discovered is that it only takes a year or two for them to check deeply and give access to a large number of fungi that ordinarily would be there. Also, there's a number of fungi that seem to get along very well with wood in a highly charred condition. It's a very unique habitat type or habitat situation, and there does seem to be a number of fungi that are able to tolerate that charring layer very easily. So we don't see charring as being something that significantly reduces the function of wood. On prescribed burning, address fall burning versus spring burning from a soil standpoint? Of course, fall burning carries with it considerably higher risk because you're burning with the organic horizons much drier. I don't see any particular problem with it as long as that duff and organic horizon layers have sufficient moisture in them that they don't burn deeply. But it is, of course, much more difficult. And then the problem in the spring is to get them to burn at all, of course. But, yeah, prescribed burning and even under burning and a lot of the things that we're probably going to have to implement to, for example, to defuel some of our heavily fueled systems right now is going to be touchy. But one thing we know is if we don't do something when they burn, it's very likely to be at the very worst time. So even if by trying to do head this off, even if we cause a fair amount of damage, we're probably not going to cause near as much damage as if we just let nature take its course at this point. But it is more difficult in the fall or in the spring. There's no doubt about it. The numbers that people can call, that would be helpful. And then let's go ahead and receive calls from the remote sites and see how many people are really out there. It's difficult, I know, but it's kind of like your first kiss. Once you do it, it's easy. Anybody from the remote sites? We've got one coming in. Another question from a grand? Go ahead. This is in Baker City. I'm wondering what the trade-off is with removing organic matter, the woody material, versus leaving it on the ground and doing an underburning, and how this relates to remove the fuels versus underburning to remove the fuels. I'm not sure I understand exactly what you're driving at. I don't see a problem with either way, actually. Underburning in a condition where you're not likely to get too much damage may not be very effective. It may be very difficult to defuel a system under the kind of environmental conditions that would prevent it from getting too hot. In some respects, I think we're going to be going to find logging the system appropriately might be the less damaging alternative. But in a lot of systems, of course, economically, it would be very, very difficult to do that because it most certainly would be a deficit-sale situation because in most cases what we have in these kinds of ecosystems is very poor value volume. So we need to be doing something in terms of perhaps even subsidizing the removal of that sort of thing to get that fuel at carbon out of the system without burning it off. There are some very difficult questions to be resolved with respect to managing this excess fuel we now have in many, especially of our drier ecosystems. If I didn't get to what you want, I'd come back again and I'll try again. That was a good answer. The only question that remains is might it not be cheaper to do a stage to under burning the deficit? Yeah, I'm sure it would be cheaper at least in the short term. But we're probably going to have a substantial learning curve with regard to how to do that. It's going to be very risky to do that and whether or not it can be reliably done without doing a lot of associated damage remains to be seen. It's going to be a very interesting thing to see develop. I think there's no doubt that at least from a small area point of view it would be cheaper to burn it from a larger system. It may not be. Fire control is not cheap. And when you're trying to burn large forested areas, just managing the fire control operation to keep that thing in check might be as expensive, perhaps even more expensive than the harvest alternative. So it remains to be seen how the gives and takes of that situation will work out. Is there anybody out there? Any more from LeGrand while we're waiting? Is there reliable information on what the fuel on the forest floors were in the Intermountain region prior to Europeans? And I guess the other question with, does the standing trees, when they burn, do they have much effect on the soil temperatures or is your primary concern the downward? The primary concern with respect to heating the soil is the downward. The standing trees, the heat all goes up. And they're very well insulated. The soil is pretty well insulated below, especially if it has a fair amount of moisture in it anyway. So that type of fire, I don't think, does do a lot of damage. It's when you get a lot of the big fuels down close to the soil and it becomes quite damaging. Did I get to both questions there? The other question was, is there reliable information on what typical down fuel loads were prior to Europeans in the Intermountain West in the forest? In a word, no. We have very few places to look where fire histories are normal. There are some, there are few, where fire history remains as best we can figure somewhat within historical variants. But I would say a lot of our information is skewed by fuel accumulations. We don't know just how much yet. That's something we're going to have to take a very critical look at and really haven't yet. Other questions? What role do you feel that grasses have in nutrient recycling as far as adding nitrates? I know they have a tremendous root system which some of it dies every year and it decomposes in the soil. I know I've heard a lot of pros and cons about planting grass in with your trees. What's your feeling on that? I think native grasses and sages probably have a fairly significant function. Yes, the roots on grasses do tend to grow and die at a very high rate. They do on trees too. The root turnover process in trees is also pretty high, surprisingly high, as to how this would balance itself out in any particular system. As far as the benefits are lacklier of than certain grasses, I couldn't tell you. We do know that grasses can be serious competition for most of our woody plants. But if we're looking at a balanced system and not just looking for timber volume growth, that's not necessarily a bad thing. And obviously, if we're dealing with wildlife situations, it's also not a bad thing. But just how this balances out, there has been a relatively small amount of work done with the interactions between the overstory of trees and the understory canopies of various layers, grass or shrub. This work is only just begun seriously four or five years ago, and it's just beginning to be some stuff up here in the literature now. I think you can expect to season some fairly significant advancements in that area over the next four or five years. But right now, I think that would be very difficult to really address in depth. Other questions from the remote sites? Come on, folks. Wake up out there. Can I get a question? Go ahead. Um... Oh, that's a good question. I'm really not in a position to answer that. I guess my feeling, the literature I've seen is that a lot of the quote-unquote non-natives that have been used for stabilization have had only limited effectiveness. And despite the fact that we expect them to see them rapidly die out, sometimes they don't. And then they continue to cause problems thereafter. Using that type of grass as a stabilization, again, you know, you're balancing the pros and cons. If you're lurking in landscapes that are highly erodible, do you know you're going to have a serious problem on? I don't think it's inappropriate to try. I think a lot of times we tend to use these kind of treatments, pretty much broad brush, and I think it would not be appropriate, for example, to do slope stabilization with non-natives in an area where the soils are fairly stable anyway. And a lot of times, you know, we're really doing a lot of balancing of pros and cons. The same is true in dealing with competition, dealing with grazing pressure, a lot of things. You're trying to grow a forest as a real balancing process. Most of the time I think you're going to be relatively right. You're probably always going to have the right reason, but you might very often get the wrong result. I think that's one thing in forestry that we have not come to grips with very well in society, and that is the relative risk of what we do. Outcomes in such complex systems are marginally predicted. Other questions? Go ahead. I was walking through a clear cut that had been burned after it had been cut, and I noticed in patches where the flames hadn't seared the ground, that it was regenerating with alder and small trees. But in the places that had been burned, there's nothing there except maybe a little thistle. Has there been much study on the difference in regeneration on the places that have been burned and the ones that haven't? Yes. There has been a fair amount of research done in that, and it all depends on what species you're talking about. For example, if you had been in a western-arch dominated ecosystem in northwestern Montana, you would have found most of the regeneration in the burn spots and very little in the non-burn spots. So it all depends on the system you're working with. And the nice thing about the broadcast burns is they create a mosaic of conditions. So you have everything from a relatively harsh burn to no burn at all. And especially where you want a mixed-species situation to come in there, if you get that kind of a mosaic, then somewhere in the system you'll have the exact requirement for each of the species that you might want to get there. So you have the best chance of getting mixed representation in the regenerating stand. Can you burn deliberately? Can you plan your burn so that that will happen? Yes. And largely broadcast burns are designed to do that very thing, is to create a mosaic in conditions. And we have recommended for quite some time that with mechanical site preparations, scarifications and the like, that they do the same thing. That they try to come out, come with an outcome that gives a full range of situations from undisturbed to heavily disturbed. But not to have very much of that heavily disturbed, as we saw, that if it's widespread, it can be devastating. Other questions from the remote sites? I have another question from Bert. Go ahead. In ground-based, like tractor systems, logging systems have an effect on the introduction of pathogens. Okay. To my knowledge, at this point, we don't have many instances where that's true. We do have some. Some of the piteatious fungi, water-mold fungi, like, oh, cedar can't think of the particular pathogen on the west coast that is very dangerous to cedar. It can be transported very easily. So there are a few pathogens where that can be an important process. Most of our native pathogens are present in most of our sites most of the time. They're endemic to the system. So moving them around is no big deal. What really creates the problem with most endemic pathogens is inappropriate stand conditions, inappropriate species, inappropriate densities, excessive competition, stress. Most of our pathogens tend to be most active in circumstances where the forest is in a condition that's inappropriate. So it becomes a symptom of a problem rather than the problem itself. Does that make sense? Is anybody at Prineville tonight? You're awfully quiet over there. Yes, I am. Okay. Any questions? Any questions from Prineville? Yeah, I have a question regarding the difference between spring and fall burning. When you consider that these systems do not evolve under spring burning and all the arthropods and the wildlife, the ground-nesting birds, have you evaluated the amount of damage you do by spring burning and to plants that grow in the spring and set seed in the spring, the early plants, when you burn them? No, in a word. There's been very little research at this point on spring burning. There is some going on now. Before you let loose of the odd. And for the last four or five years, but very little has actually come out of that research at this point yet. And there hasn't much been done on functional nature of that sort of thing. Interestingly enough, I had the privilege of being in Siberia a year ago and they have a little bit of work that is published where they used various kinds of burning at various fuel levels. The type of thing we've done here only they did some very detailed microbial functional work over there. Unfortunately at this point we don't have that material yet interpreted. So we don't have anything from them yet that I could pass along to you. But we are at this moment trying to get that converted to English so that we can see what it is that they were able to do. Twenty years ago the Russians had very active people in Siberia. They were doing a lot of research during a time when they were doing fairly well economically. Unfortunately they're not doing as much today and even getting this material transcribed is becoming very difficult. But they did do some good work and I'm hoping to get my hands on that material fairly soon. So I can't give you very much specific information. I think again we can expect to start to see that to come. But there isn't much in the literature at this point at least not much that I'm aware of. Okay we haven't heard anything from halfway or the Dalles, Ontario. I know it's long distance from Walla Walla but you can still call. Any other questions from Pineville? Go ahead. This is not really a soil question but more of a juniper question. I'm wondering if there are any pathogens that can lower the juniper population or any other sorts of biologic control? I know there's a number of different places where we're having problems with junipers. We know very little about the pathology of the juniperaceae. It's a very understudied species. Obviously before the last ten years or so there's been very little interest in it and so very little in the way of money to fund research on it. Again I think you'll see that start to change because we have some obvious things going on with the distribution and the condition of juniper stands throughout the west and especially some in the southwest. And at this point the reasons for a great deal of that are still a great mystery and whether or not any of it could be microbial based I have no idea at this point. I have heard no rumors to the effect that anybody has discovered any microbial things going on in some of those changing juniper ecosystems. Anybody else? Questions? Enterprise has been awfully quiet too tonight. I know Leo must be up there. How about here in our local audience? Any questions, Lynn? Yeah. That's a good question. I really don't know the answer to it. I'll give you this much of the information of what we know in stands of forest trees. Just hold off for a minute, please. We find very little problem with nutrient deficiencies in young trees because you do tend to have a relatively high amount of nutrient for a very low demand because the little small trees make a very low demand. Once the stand closes apparently what nitrogen is in the system in terms of in the trees at that time is pretty much all they ever get. So the growth process from that point on comes primarily from internally cycled nitrogen. So if that helps you anytime understand that relationship I can't answer it directly, only indirectly. In the most cases I know of where they do nutritional work they do the nutritional work in terms of analyzing leaves for example how much should a leaf have before it begins to show indication of the tree showing nutrient deficiency they seem to be able to use seedling work and apply it to larger trees. It's done. I don't know if there's a problem with doing that I've not heard of a problem in doing that or not but that's the way it's done that's how they determine whether or not a large tree is having a nutrient problem is they take some needles off it run it through analysis find out what the nutrient content is if it's up to an inappropriate amount which they've determined with seedlings that it takes for the tree to grow without symptoms then they assume that it's enough. I make static that we have another question from a remote site. Go ahead on it. That's another good question that I can't answer to my knowledge there has not been any work done on that yet however we do know that there are some problems with respect to competitive relations between plants in terms of competition factors either from the microbial community in the soils or from changes in the soil brought about by another kind of a plant which is detrimental to mycorrhiza or other microbial support of conifer roots so I think you can assume that there probably is some of that kind of thing going on but at this point we don't know very much about it we do know that for example that some shrub species are really good nurse plants for some kinds of mycorrhiza for conifers I think that we have some situations where we have other kinds of plants which we know are very negative so there's a whole array of interactions between plants that occurs below ground that we know very little about really it's a very difficult and expensive area of research and as a result it's something that we're finding things out about slowly Let's go to our local audience and Lynn has a question You mentioned earlier that there was a problem with removing excess fuel at times and also a problem with leaving it in place that it might burn too hot is chipping that material an option either removing it as chip material or spreading it on site Okay, that's a good question Could the remote sites hear that question? Okay, thanks Okay We've tried a number of ways of dealing with chipping One of them that's been tried is chipping and just putting them back on site essentially evenly Now interestingly enough this was done at 10,000 feet in Wyoming and two things happened Number one, the first couple years rainfall events in those chips leeches, large amounts of phenolic water soluble phenolics They're very toxic to most living things So when they inter-planted in those chips all the seedlings died Not only that if you went back to that site in August and dug down four inches of ice block soils So during the winter time when it was 20 below zero and it froze them down to a foot or two or three come spring it was like having a layer of Styrofoam over the soil and it turned out to be a real poor idea Now, a year ago we finally got a chance to try this again and we are doing some research right now on the University of California is for us near Blodgett, California on putting the stuff back on the site instead of spreading it on the site we're creating what we'd call artificial logs on that site covering less than 25% of the area and creating piles large enough that we think we'll get permanent deposits of organic very similar to what you would get with advanced decomposed wood how that turns out remains to be seen but I think it'll probably turn out well So there are some scenarios that you could devise where I think we could do this whether or not it's economic from the standpoint of the energy it requires to chip that's a different story but theoretically whether this can be done I think we do need to answer that How large are your chips? These are relatively large chips and we're trying it in this particular situation because those are warm moist forests we expect chip decomposition to happen very fast so I think we can probably get 100 years worth of experiment in the Northwest in 10 years down there so we hope that we can do that and see what the outcome is that's not providing a lot of answers but providing some information Another question from LeGrand I believe one of your slides showed that a lot of the nitrogen in the forest floor was held in the big logs it seems to indicate that maybe we're taking off a lot of nitrogen when we harvest a tree No, that's actually not true When you harvest a tree a trunk has very little nitrogen in it and the reason why is because the tree does not store nitrogen there it stores nitrogen in the small twigs and leaves so if you leave the small twigs, leaves and roots you leave most of the nitrogen that your tree held there Now what happens when you take a piece of a tree trunk and lay it on the ground and get it to decompose is as it decomposes you get these free living nitrogen fixing bacteria in there they pull the nitrogen in so it's not nitrogen that came there it's nitrogen that's being pulled into that site so it's really quite a different scenario there so the log as a fresh log does not have very much nitrogen in it but as one that's in the act of decomposing especially the older it gets the more nitrogen you get until you get conifer roots coming in there and so as the conifer roots come in there then they start transporting it out Other questions from remote sites? Recognize that you do have to do some site preparation you don't have to do an overzealous job of it and I also showed you some slides there I showed you that modest mechanical disruption was not a problem in fact, light mechanical disruption if anything could enhance your nitrogen situation it's only when that disturbance gets to be heavy handed that it gets to be a problem Yeah, can you distinguish between light and heavy? That's, you know, it's arbitrary but I'd say if you're disturbing more than 50% of the surface area you're starting to get into an area where you're getting heavy handed and you're disturbing 75% of it you most assuredly are being heavy handed Something below that is fairly moderate You get into the same problem when you start describing fire Okay, what's hot and what's not? We can say that when you start getting above 400 degrees temperature you start volatilizing a very large portion of the nitrogen but what's it take to give you 400 degrees? Well, as best we can figure the flame length in excess of 4 feet These are all very subjective kinds of things Like I say, I think we recognize that we do have to do some burning we recognize that we do have to do some mechanical site preparation I think we can also recognize that we have to do it as light a hand as we can and achieve the objective that you must achieve to get the forest restarted Again, it's a whole line of betrayed-offs and I would err to the light side rather than err to the heavy side More questions from remote sites? Can I have another question from Primeville? Regarding soil compaction A lot of the areas in a number of the forests that have heavy fuel loading heavy fuel loading is due to previous logging flash and a lot of those areas are already exceeding compaction levels some as high as 30, 40 to 50% So how do you suggest going in there and removing some of those fuels without permanently destroying soil? We're going to have some situations where the best fix is not a great one because of the situation we're already in In a case like that, again, I would say if you're in grave danger of having very heavy wildfires in there what's going to happen is you're going to have a very heavy wildfire and compacted soils So I think doing some pre-fire management in terms of doing something to moderate that fuel is not inappropriate even if it might cost you some additional compaction Again, it's a matter of trade-offs and it's very difficult to say just where that trade-off would be unless you're standing on the site looking at it Basically what you're talking there is restructuring the soil That's a very, very difficult thing to do and I guess the real bottom line to the messages that I've always tried to produce with respect to soil and soil organic matter management and compaction and that sort of thing is prevention is sure by far and away the best way to go because once you've caused the problem bringing them back online is very difficult but recognize also that natural processes weren't too kind either and a lot of natural wildfires a lot of our ecosystems do tend to burn with hot hot fires infrequent real hot fires I think that's an example of where influence of human hands could actually increase productivity as some of our forest sites in some cases considerably because we do have the option of using a little less drastic systems to regulate carbon in these sites than Mother Nature has Some of our relatively long fire cycle subalpine fir forests are an example certainly east side Rocky Mountain subalpine fir lodgepole pine forests are an example where a managed forest could well have higher productivity than natural forests Considering how much just the nutrients that you've been talking about are tied in with the organic cycle and probably the other 14 or 15 or so essential nutrients that are also being cycled in the organic cycle do you want to even touch the thing about you know removal versus burning as it might affect some of those other 15 Oh sure actually nitrogen and sulfur are the two nutrients that are most closely tied to organics most of the rest aren't too closely tied to organics and it's relatively uncommon that we find real micronutrient deficiencies in forest sites there are a few but that's the exception more than the rule and in most cases where it's been investigated if you don't take hide hair feathers and all if you take just bowls your chances of impacting the forest nutrient cycle adversely are very small now if you take hide hair feathers and all different stories then you have a chance to maybe get into some of the micronutrient storage problems especially where they're in short supply so generally speaking in our unfertile forests and some aren't by the way not all are infertile but in infertile situations we do not recommend whole tree harvesting and removal I think that is the principal way you might cause problems for the most part if you're just taking wood out of the system you're probably not putting it at at any grave disadvantage from the standpoint of the nutrient cycle okay there has been quite a bit of work done on that questions from remote sites because of wood under the ground as being contributors to more over the long term how will you get those trees on the ground? you don't obviously if you have large deposits of decomposed wood deep in soils then you've had forests on that site for a very long period of time in most cases where you have a significant downslope to the forest you do get some movement of soils downslope and they tend to move down and engulf and bury this wood over time so that's how you get them deep into the soil profile in addition to just large roots obviously large roots are well buried in the soil profile as well but this we made a calculation once actually on a subalpine fur system figure out how many gallons of water per acre there was as I recall the figure was around 80,000 gallons of water were stored in wood in late August in that particular site that we were looking at that's a lot of water just to be stored in something that when we started out with we didn't expect to even find in these forest soils we expected to either be all burned up or decomposed over time something that was something a revelation to see how persistent this stuff was does that answer your question? So then what is the removal of large bulls for the forest of the future? Okay obviously we have a situation where if you consider the fact that we might in fairly intensive commercial forestry operations for example grow more and more smaller stems to get volumes up that could over the long term create a problem because the kind of wood that's persistent remember has to be fairly large not only that probably the most persistent wood is heartwood of the species I mentioned Douglas fir large pines so depending on how you silver culturally approach that system again if this is an infertile system and not all are you could conceivably run yourself into problems by continuously growing more of smaller stems to get volumes up so yes that could be a problem but could it also be a problem if you remove everything that is old and large that dies absolutely absolutely we vociferously recommend against that for a long time now that's not a good idea next question anymore from LeGrand I have to go back to the nutrient thing the other nutrients and stuff I've been doing some experiments where I fuse the ash on porcelain tiles of different parts of conifers quite often there's very little difference in the appearance of what's in the sapwood and bark on the main part of the stem from what's in the small branches there is a difference in the way it appears in the foliage you know and when you look at the there is no heartwood in the small stems when you imagine the mineral nutrients that are going up the tree are going up through the sapwood and then coming back down through the cambium you are removing the stuff the stuff that's going into the foliage has to come there is part of the cycle so you are taking things you are taking some and you know I also did a literature search in trying to find out what the research that's been done on fertilizing and not just the pacific northwest region but it is amazing how much research has been done on just a few of the macronutrients and very little is done on the micronutrients that's correct most of what's been done has been done with the macronutrients the most interesting stuff on forest fertilization I think has come out of New Zealand they have some forests that are in their second and third rotations over there that started on sites that were not forested and they are sandy soils so there is a very tight nutrient cycle there and Bellard's a name that sticks in my mind and there is a few others if you are interested in that sort of thing that's the literature to go to I think is the most interesting literature where you are on sandy soils that have very little in terms of any nutrient including all of the micronutrients actual storage in the soil itself so dealing with those forests the first forest they got was just a wonderful marvelous forest and the second was a disaster and now they have sort of learned how to deal with it to replace the things that need to be replaced and the forestry in those New Zealand sites is really fascinating another question back and back I don't know what root rot is but does it have an effect on nutrient either production or storage in the soils and another production storage question is snags do they produce nutrients or store them yes a snag as it's decomposing standing is also a pretty fair sponge for nitrogen and once it falls down of course it's going to do its thing just like any other piece of decomposed wood you started the first part of the second the first one was on root rot I don't know what it is but I read about in timber sale environmental analysis and I don't know if it was a microbial function right these are sometimes overly aggressive decomposers and some of them have associated nitrogen fixation just like with any other decomposer in fact it's fairly significant input of nitrogen for example from a northern Idaho site that's highly defect prone and full of root rot and basically falling apart you can get a pretty fair amount of nitrogen from that source of decomposition what's happening here is the decomposers in this case the root rot as they decompose the wood and release the simple energy containing compounds from the complex cellulose and lignins in the wood these non-symbiotic fixers are there and catch any leakage most of this decomposition is done with extracellular enzymes in other words the fungi release the enzymes into the tissue decomposition happens and then they pull this stuff back these non-symbiotic decomposers are grabbing it off too so they're competing with the decomposer for that energy source and most of the decomposers have enough leakage that byproduct of that leakage is they are supporting a population of these nitrogen fixing bacteria so virtually all sources of biological decomposition carry with it this ability to act as a nitrogen sponge so I guess the simple answer to your question is yes the Blue Mountains has a lot of volcanic ash-influenced soils that have a real high phosphorus holding capacity would you consider those fertile and how important is this nutrient cycling in them because one particular issue that's come up is particularly in the subalpine fur zone is regeneration on lodgepole pine harvest areas is pretty tough you get real poor regeneration in places I wonder how much that could be to nutrient cycling problems on these ash soils the ash soils have some very interesting characteristics with respect to local ash it depends on a number of things including the physical nature of the ash and I would suggest you talk with Mike Geist about that right now he's among the best first in volcanic ash soils of those people that are still currently active I would say this that yes, volcanic ash affected soils are much more fertile than the alternatives they also have much higher water holding capacity and it's something I should have probably elaborated on a little bit when I had the slide from Arizona up there in northern Idaho we have an activity that's at least one habitat series maybe two more productive than the climate could possibly support but with the water retention and storage ability of that volcanic ash we have up there we have a great deal more productive for us than the climate would indicate we should have and managing soils in northern Idaho certainly you have to be very cognizant of that volcanic ash especially when it's there in fairly short supply so we really get after people to very carefully manage that ash layer especially when mechanically treating those soils because it's very easy to lose if you've only got two or three inches of stuff there it's very easy to destroy it by mechanically by turning it around other questions from remote sites we're getting kind of close to the end of the evening so we want to give everybody a chance out there how about LeGrand any more from here are we winding down one more call from remote sites go ahead don't be bashful we can't see you all is quiet help me thank Al Harvey for his good presentation thanks Al you can take a break we can get your slides later one of the things I want to emphasize a great deal is to sign the sign up sheets here at LeGrand and the remote sites we really rely on those heavily for our attendance records and for the facilitators at the remote sites if you take a head count just to give us a double check on that that would be greatly appreciated one thing I want to point out again is the is the publication that Al Harvey is the principal author and if you're interested you can get that from the Department of Agriculture PNW research station P.O. Box 3890 a little lower a little lower okay okay so you can order those we have some of those at each site you can copy the address off the back of those if there aren't enough at the remote sites Al just gave me another publication Proceedings Management and Productivity of Western Montaigne Forest Soils the same thing goes with this one if you're copying that down you can do that and on the back of this I'm sure there's an address where we can attain that for you so while you're doing that I'll just kind of wrap this up next week we're going to have another continuation of the seminar series we'll have Mark Ferns who is from the Department of Minerals and Geology from Baker City and he's going to address the geology of the Blue Mountains region and Jim Clayton is coming from the forestry lab in Boise and he's going to be addressing soil formation exterior formation of forest soils as well as local forest soil formation so that should be good so be sure and come with your Ash protective hat on because he's going to talk about Montmazom I think probably one of the guys will be and that should be pretty exciting I'm really excited about the seminar series I'm pleased that your attendance tonight informed at the end of the series like we did last time we used those a lot we rely on those for how we should structure the next seminar series so keep mental notes about how you like the presentations and for those folks at the remote sites if there's some problem that you couldn't hear the questions and we gathered that from the one comment let us know about that if the visuals weren't up to snuff and we'll talk to the EdNet folks here and make sure that that's better next time thanks for coming appreciate your attendance last week Alan Harvey introduced the series with a presentation on soil structure and function he talked about the various layers of the soil from the organic litter at the ground surface to the inorganic mineral soil several layers down he talked about the organisms involved in nutrient cycling soil development and he spoke of how we can care for the soil with better management practices this week we'll focus on the origin of soils, the development and the geologic evolution our first speaker is Mark Ferns and he is the resident geologist with the Baker City field office of the Oregon department of geology and mineral industries he's been with the department now for 15 years ever since he graduated from the University of Oregon with a master of science degree in geology he knows an awful lot about the soils of northeast Oregon I know this from a presentation he gave at Sigma Xi that I brought him here to do and the title of his talk here this evening is the geologic evolution of the Blue Mountains region please welcome Mark Ferns before we get started Mark's getting hooked up there when we ask questions be sure I'm live it's a pleasure being here I don't feel some reservation about doing this I've never done anything quite like this you'll have to bear with me as I try to get organized when we talk about soils and soil formation one thing that we have to consider is the bedrock geology that we're working with we have a profile here showing a typical soil profile most of what you will cover in this seminar deals with the essentially what us geologists consider to be the skim on the crust the material that gets in the way of our rocks what I'm more interested in is the geologic on the diagram is referred to as the fresh material and that evolution of that fresh material I have to bear with me my eyesight is one of the things that happen to people as they grow bald head in and potbellying is that their eyesight begins to go and I have difficulty telling whether or not the geologic map on the screen is in focus geologic maps can tell us a lot about an area and they can be used to aid in determining what types of soils that you might be dealing with when we look at geology we look at two basic types of processes we look at constructional processes we look at erosional processes constructional processes are the volcanic metamorphic tectonic and sedimentary processes by which a body of rock is formed the erosional processes are those by which rock is broken down form sediment and eventually to form soil the geologic map we have here the vinegar hill area near greenhorn the yellow units are special debris and they are a type of erosional deposit the pink unit is a basalt flow it's important in that the basalt flow is a geochemically and structurally coherent map unit about everywhere in that pink area a rock is going to behave the same and it should break down to form the same types of soils other geologic map units such as the green unit are a composite of different types of rocks that have been physically juxtaposed they have various types of chemical and physical properties and there you may see a wide range of soils for them when we look at northeastern Oregon we look at an area that is geologically young by the standards of the earth although the earth itself was about 4 billion years old the rocks that make up northeastern Oregon are less than 300 million years old and these oldest rocks were formed in a region far from where they are today they are part of what we call the exotic terrains fragments of island arc and ocean floor material that are initially formed in a warm marine environment many miles off shore we have two island arc terrains in green we have the Wallowa 7 Devils arc in the yellow we have parts of the Huntington arc these are volcanic island chains that are separated by a wide expanse of oceanic deep water sediments within the island arcs we find a large variety of different rock types one thing we find are limestone reefs and shoals such as a limestone deposit here on Big Bar on Snake River we also find areas where we have fine grain calcareous sediments that are deposited in basins adjacent to the island arc these typically weather down into the rounded hills that are common in the area south of Huntington this being Bull Run Mountain contrast that with a rugged topography of the cores of the island arcs such as the area near the Iron Dyke Mine on Snake River the core areas are composed of intrusive and extrusive volcanic rocks intrusive volcanic rocks are those that rose in the earth's crust and cooled below the crust the extrusive rocks are the ones that float out upon the surface as lava flows or as ash flows the island arc terrains are made up of individuals