Doug- First, I wanted to say that Joe has brought up a point that is spurring a good discussion. Like you, I disagree with him with regard to discontinuing it's (the concept of forest health) usage. I think that he's correct that the timber industry, and through guilt by association land management agencies (however accurate or inaccurate that is), have used it sufficiently in their own contexts that "Forest Health" has connotations not originally intended. But I hope that we can 'define' it through continued usage in our own context. Your use of the word "resilience" is a good start. To borrow the human health analogy, invalids may do well in the benign environment of a rest home, but a better measure of health and vigor might be our response to less benign environments, as demonstrated by our ability to 'weather' changes. In fact, I rather like the analogy...I see great parallels between forest health and public health (probably a function of my immmediate environment, my better half has a Doctorate in Public Health...:>) as well as an individual human's health as compared to a single tree's health. And to take back another abused term, the environments that both trees and humans reside in could both be correctly referred to as ecosystems. I spent two weeks in several forested ecosystems last month. I will soon report of some of the conditions and relationships I found in foxtail and bristlecone pine forests, and perhaps others. One of the more empirical methods of measuring health in both humans and forests is their ability to attain "senior citizen status". Foxtail pines aged to 2,000 plus years and bristlecone pines attaining 4 thousand years of age, surely demonstrate resilience to the manifold changes in their environment (9,000 to 12,000 feet in elevation, high UV exposure, extreme temperature range, minimal soils, seasonally variable moisture). -DonRB> Date: Wed, 5 Nov 2008 19:16:43 -0800> From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: [ENTS] Re: Forest Health> To: [email protected]> > Ed, Joe, ENTS,> I like the term forest health. I think it was Joe that said that humans are single individuals and therefore should not be compared to a forest. This may have been how we once thought of humans, but it is not the only way or even the best way to think about humans. Most of the cells within and on our bodies are not actually human and they are hardly trivial. Without these microorganisms we could not survive. Each human is therefore an ecosystem just like a forest but on a much smaller scale. A healthy human, like a healthy forest, can recover from an amazing variety and degree of insults and still recover. I believe Lee has referred to this as resilience. The healthier the forest the more resilient the forest. Doctors can determine the health of a human using a number of tests and I am sure that a forest ecologist can determine the health of a forest in a similar manner. However, as Ed has mentioned, we will never know all that can go wrong> with a human and sometimes people die due to our lack of knowledge. The same applies to forests, but it seems a poor reason not to try and understand how to determine the health of a forest.> > Doug _________________________________________________________________ Get 5 GB of storage with Windows Live Hotmail. http://windowslive.com/Explore/Hotmail?ocid=TXT_TAGLM_WL_hotmail_acq_5gb_112008 --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ Eastern Native Tree Society http://www.nativetreesociety.org
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