The Black Hills Forest Management

Old growth + new grown mix is good. Ever notice how the forest floor is dead in a completely old growth section?

The "progressive" trend is to want all old growth trees because tourists like big trees. Don't do a search on Google or AI. That info is all generated by a climate.org data set that is skewed to advocating old growth trees exclusively. That way when it does burn, it's catastrophic, proof of climate change. Don't believe it. It's propaganda.

Do real research. Don't believe the bogus hype.

Look at photos of the Black Hills from before the turn of the century. There were far less trees and more native prairie grass. The trees burned in great fires, but the forests were in balance because of it.

I have recently been reading some interesting books by Dan O'Brien a rancher for 30 years near Spearfish SD. The kicker is Dan is also an Author and an Endangered Species Biologist. My opinions lately have admittedly, been heavily influenced by Dan's writing.

Dan expounds on these theories base on 30 years of experimentation and observations on his own ranch in the Black Hills. He also switched from running cattle on his ranch to running native buffalo. The results were dramatic.

Allowing old growth trees to be harvested allows new growth to take it's place. The ensuing growth includes native prairie grasses (big bluestem, indian grass, switchgrass, little bluestem, sideoats grama, and blue grama) and low brush to grown, exposes bordering old growth stand to sunlight and encourages growth underneath those as well.

This undergrowth provides critical habitat for birds, small animals and young of every species. All good things.

I like to think about the fire burn area west of Custer from a fire maybe 20-years ago. That area is one of the only excellent areas to hunt native ruffed grouse in the Black Hills.

It's interesting the Lidar (airborne tree diameter) Study, conducted by the U.S. Forest Service Resource Managment group, collected data from the Black Hills Experimental Forest exclusively, nowhere else. This section of Black Hills National Forest was founded in 1908, and has been had experiments in forestry and silviculture done on it over the last 116 years or so. Not exactly a random sample or an unbiased population selection. Maybe they don't understand rational subgrouping to produced unbiased data?

I believe Dave Mertz of the Norbeck Society was a senior staff member of that Resource group at the time. Metz has a background as an intelligence officer in the US Army, then joined the US Forest Service

Geeze. Dave Mertz has been peddling this story for a few years now, all based on a costly 2012 "Airborne Lidar Survey" done by the US Forest Service, exclusively on a small "experimental" section of the Black Hills called ironically enough "The Black Hills Experimental Forest".  Note:  The 2023 LiDAR study data has not been analyzed yet, and probably won' be now until 2026.

I have personally hiked through that section of the BHNF and believe me, it is not a section of forest land that I would have selected. It's what engineers or statisticians would call a biased rational subgroup, selected to fit a pre-supposed opinion. That small area (just 0.3 % of the entire Black Hills forest region in area), has been experimented on since its inception in 1908. They intentionally selected and area whose mean tree diameter at the 4.5 foot level was less than 9" (the standard minimum for selection by the logging industry).

I believe Dave Mertz of the Norbeck Society was a senior staff member of the US Forest Service Resource group at the time they did the study. A bogus theory based on biased data.