Humboldt County has prepared a plan for how it’s going to manage the McKay Community Forest just outside of Eureka, and it borrows heavily from how the city of Arcata manages its own community forest.
The forest stewardship plan lays out how the county will use ecological forestry to manage the 1,194-acre McKay Community Forest, which was established in 2014, for the next 10 to 15 years. Hank Seemann, the county’s deputy director of Environmental Services, said during an informational meeting on May 12 that ecological forest management recognizes the diversity and complexity of the forest ecosystem.
“We want to focus on the entire ecosystem and not just the trees,” Seemann said. “We want to ensure that our management maintains the integrity of the landscape and is based on an understanding of ecological processes.”
The forest stewardship plan focuses on how the county is going to reduce fire risk, sequester carbon, manage tree growth and restore habitat, among other things, in the forest.
Right now, the McKay Community Forest has mostly uniform, even-age stands of young trees with little structural diversity. The goal is to use timber harvesting as a tool to create a mosaic of trees of varying size and age, including bigger and older ones, which would foster a diverse landscape capable of supporting a variety of wildlife, Seemann said.
About 80% of the forest, 800 acres, is made up of 25- to 45-year-old stands of third-growth trees that were created through clear-cutting between 1975 to 1990, said Jared Gerstein, a registered professional forester with consulting firm BBW & Associates, which specializes in conservation forestry.
Third-growth tree stands are densely packed resulting in some self-pruning since there is so little space and light reaching smaller trees, which end up dying, Gerstein said.
The plan is to transition those stands into the second-growth stands, which make up about 122 acres of the forest, Gerstein said. Those stands were clearcut between 1900 and 1930 and thinned in the 1960s, resulting in older, larger trees that are more spaced out.
The county intends to create those conditions in third-growth stands by harvesting 20% to 40% of the timber volume in 50 to 100 acres of the forest per year, with plans to re-enter every 10 to 20 years.
“We’ll always be cutting less than is growing, essentially cutting half of what’s growing,” Gerstein said. “So the volume and the sizes of tree will go up over time in the McKay fairly indefinitely.”
The Arcata Community Forest offers a glimpse into what McKay might look like in the future, said Mark Andre, a registered professional forester who was the city of Arcata’s director of environmental services for more than 30 years. The city has been using selection timber harvesting in the forest for years to add complexity to the forest and improve the quality of the habitat for wildlife.
“Those 800 acres of young forest aren’t very complex,” Andre said. “It’s kind of a simplified ecosystem so through some periodic timber harvests you can generate some dead trees, grow large trees, come up with more downed woody debris and logs on the forest floor, which creates habitat niches which is important for a variety of wildlife.”
The McKay Community Forest Trail Plan, a companion document, focuses on trail development and recreation. The environmental review for the trail plan is expected to be released soon and trail-building is expected to start this summer, though people frequently use existing trails and roads within the forest already.
The county has a partnership with the Voluntary Trail Stewards, an organized program of the Humboldt Trails Council, to build the trails and may soon have one with the Redwood Coast Mountain Bike Association, too.
“They have an intense interest in creating mountain bike trails in the greater Eureka area,” Seemann said, “and mountain biking is really a growing activity, especially for people in high school and junior high.”
The county plans to reconvene an advisory group for the community forest in the near future, Seemann said.
Sonia Waraich can be reached at 707-441-0504.
