Here are some more interesting facts about this:

Talks about regen, or lack of, in an old growth area of PA.
http://www.fortgrundsow.com/Cook1.html


Here are some other snipets about Cooks Forest and PA's Old Growth Forests ..

"According to the DCNR, less than one percent of Pennsylvania forestland (30,000 acres) can be defined as "old growth."

"Old growth forests occur when man or nature leaves the forest undisturbed and the forest succession cycle is not reset."

"Cooks Forest's white pine and hemlock trees are between 350 and 450 years old."

"The inaccessibility of some parcels spared them from the widespread clearcutting. Even today, the forests along these muddy bogs and rocky inclines have never been harvested; however, individual trees might have been removed from the area."

"Although Pennsylvania's old-growth fragments are too small to provide significant wildlife habitat, Carson says there are some animals that require old growth."



Personally, I have a hard time getting overly concerned about any overbrowsing that occurs in less less than 1% of PA's forested land whose inaccessibility is the main reason they are even here to today to start with !!


99er

Dang, I go away for a couple days and you guys ruin my post. We need to start using Robert's Rules of Order so posts stay on topic.

We are being misled by technicality. BOTH mature forest, and it's museumpiece brother:"OLD GROWTH", have dead, lifeless floors. Ask someone for the percentage of forest with dead, lifeless floors and the numbers will stagger you, if they are accurate. Nobody I know of wants the pockets of virgin, old growth forest that remain, to be leveled. The problem in PA is the restrictions put in place by lawsuits from treehuggers. Limiting logging to tiny parcels and then prohibiting clearcutting is the disease. I think we have plenty of ferns, thank you!

How can there be overbrowsing in an area that has nothing but bark within 50 feet of the ground? No new trees are going to grow there anyhow! If they would log proper everywhere else, no deer would ever step foot in those OLD GROWTH areas. They would have no reason to. There would be boatloads of browse and cover everywhere else.

You are right on the money. When Alt and foresters point to the lack of understory in pole in saw timber, they are looking at a perfectly natural occurrence that will happen with or without deer. The Brady's Lake browse study showed that browse production in a clearcut drops by 75% after twelve years without any deer present.

Over the years I have watched areas progress from fields , to cedar and sumac, to polar of saw timber quality. The understory decreased as the amount of shading increased. I also watched what happened when areas of saw timber ,with no understory was cut. The cut area produced abundant regeneration ,while the uncut adjacent ares still remained wide open.