Brett, Although the debate gets slightly emotional at times, I guess this is a proof of involvment. Nonetheless, I appreciate the fact that you have started an interesting debate concerning silviculture, forestry and integrated land management. You wrote , I'm assuming that it pertains to public land, and I'm assuming that even-aged management is a nice way of saying clearcut, ( I think that the "temporary meadow" designation in Option 9 has a much nicer ring to it...) and that by limiting the canopy openings to a half acre or less, that would effectively limit clearcutting to 1/2 acre or less as well. On this point, I would like to point out that european silviculture is based on the compartimenting of a forest patch in blocks (called parcelles in France) ... and that these blocks have from 5 to 25 ha of area ... and that they are mostly under what we call even aged management. In most oak and beech forests, there has already been a few revolutions wich prove that the system works as far as maintaining the tree composition is concerned. The impact on biodiver- sity is however unknown but deer and wild boars are at least very much preserved. Some precautions and efforts are necessary that I will not detail here. The point to be made here is that diversity of structure is maintained by having 20 ha blocks of different sizes adjacent one to the others. Jacques Trencia e-mail:"trencia@cfl.forestry.ca"
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