By Kyle Smith, Washington Forest Manager for The Nature Conservancy
Mastication, according to Wikipedia, is the process by which food is crushed and ground by teeth. It is the first step of digestion, and it increases the surface area of foods to allow a more efficient break down by enzymes.
It’s also a forest restoration tool that we’re using in the Central Cascades Forests, about 36,500 acres the Conservancy manages along the I-90 corridor in Central Washington.
Crew from Wildfire Home Protection gets ready to chew up small trees and underbrush on Cle Elum Ridge. ©TNC
In the forests along Cle Elum ridge above the town of Roslyn, heavy machinery has chewed through small trees and underbrush, grinding the shrubbery into chips in seconds, all in the name of forest health and reduced risk of wildfire.
Grinding and chipping the trees into smaller pieces increases the surface area, and once those smaller chips are on the ground and in contact with the soil, they can break down faster and quickly reduce the fire hazards on the landscape.
It’s very satisfying to watch the machine work and to know that nearby communities will be safer and other trees will have the opportunity to grow bigger and stronger with more access to water, nutrients and sunlight once this undergrowth is cleared away.
Much of the forests in Central Washington are dense and overgrown, because we’ve suppressed the natural low-intensity fires that burned across this landscape for generations before the early 1900s.
This means trees are competing with each other for water, nutrients and sunlight, and become more susceptible to disease and insect.
These conditions, along with a warming climate, increased drought, and a growing population moving into forested areas creates the conditions for bigger, hotter fires that confront firefighters, endanger people and destroy water quality and wildlife habitat.
One of our goals in the forests near Cle Elum and Roslyn is to reduce the threat of large high severity, catastrophic wildfires that can spread rapidly. By using the masticator we can reduce ladder fuels that can move fire from the forest floor and up into the tree canopies.
We thin out and and chip trees like grand fir that would have historically been killed by periodic, low-intensity fires. We retain trees such as ponderosa pine, western larch, western white pine, and Douglas-fir that are more drought and fire-resistant.
Reducing the forest density also allows the existing trees more water, light, and resources to grow big and fend off attacks from insects and disease.
Another goal is to prepare the forest for prescribed burning. By conducting this initial first step in mastication, we can reduce the tree densities and amount of fuel and thus enable a low intensity prescribed fire that we can use to maintain the forest for the long term.
This year we have completed more than 600 acres of forest health thinning and mastication projects in the Central Cascades, with more work planned for 2021. We’ve worked with Washington Department of Natural Resources and other local partners to increase the scale of the work through cooperative planning efforts.
This has also been a steady source of work for local contractor Wildfire Home Protection and enabled them to purchase a new, larger, machine known as "Big Red" that can operate on steeper slopes and "chew up" more material thus reducing the costs to conduct this work and achieving more acres of restoration.
This work is an important component to TNC's larger forest health initiative that will require increased collaboration with State, Federal and private partners, and new funding sources and incentives to treat and maintain the health of forests in Central and Eastern Washington.
Banner photo by Kyle Smith, TNC
