Girdling Douglas-firs

KMUD radio show for the Institute for Sustainable Forestry on July 7, 2020. I wrote and presented a half-hour program centered on girdling Douglas-firs for ecological restoration and fire safety, as part of ISF’s Sustainable Forestry Journalism Project.

Along with making biochar, girdling firs is a way to make forest waste into a resource. Either way, we are reducing fuel. We don’t have time to make biochar out of all the excess fuel resulting from fire suppression, but girdling is fast.

In the absence of fire, Douglas-fir becomes dominant. Douglas-fir is a pyrophyte; it likes to burn. When a Douglas-fir forest burns, it tends to take the rest of the forest with it.

In a fire-adapted landscape, a healthy forest needs regular fire. We can’t return healthy fire without first reducing accumulated fuel—including living Douglas-firs. But removal costs money.

Girdling kills Douglas-firs and leaves them standing, rendering them minor contributors to wildfire but major ones to animal habitat. While it may seem that a dead tree is more of a fire hazard than a live one, it’s actually the reverse.

Just as biochar serves many purposes, so does girdling Douglas-firs. Primarily, it saves the forest from incineration in a wildfire. But also, many species depend on snags (dead standing trees) for food, nesting and habitat. By rendering firs into snags, you are increasing forest diversity.

Find out how you can greatly enhance fire safety for yourself and your land with very little effort, by girdling Douglas-firs.