This is a cool video! I’ll provide some thoughts: https://twitter.com/defjon5/status/1390350624374476804

1. R6 has very different management plans and guidelines for removing hazard trees than R5 does. I can’t speak to this particular project; why larger deaths of trees were cut in certain areas, etc.

Salvaging around campgrounds and trails is not unusual. It’s a huge liability to leave standing dead trees in places people will continue returning to, regardless of how hot it burned & whether the site is closed or not.

(Last summer I had to convince someone to at least move their tent to a different spot in a closed campground. They were camping under a pretty sketchy widow-maker on a dead tree.)

2. “Green tree” is an arbitrary term: a tree can still have green needles and experience delayed mortality. Especially fir, which are more sensitive to fire than pine. It depends on the % of live crown remaining, which you can’t exactly assess in the air.

3. Big picture: many (most?) forests don’t have a blueprint for how to manage dead trees after LARGE fires. That’s why contemporary research on the effects of salvage logging is so important. We will see big changes to post-fire management in my lifetime; some good, some bad.

The best we can do right now is look at areas that burned 10-20 years ago and see what worked and what didn’t work. Forests that are converting to shrublands after burning multiple times are pretty damning evidence.

(Trees in the foreground were planted and may or may not survive. I certainly wouldn’t have planted here without better site prep first.)