...the presettlement prescription that was developed by the Ecological Restoration Institute, and before that the Ecological Restoration Lab, headed by Dr. Wally Covington—the presettlement prescription that is being implemented is the most extreme method of forest restoration that has been proposed or implemented or just brought up yet in this debate and this developing technology of forest restoration. It removes an extreme number of trees.

In the case of the experimental plots that were cut out at Fort Valley, it removed up to 90 percent of the trees in the blocks, and often left a very evenly spaced structure, so that it looked very much—it was very extremely open, but also looked very even and almost tree-farm-like, especially in some of the earlier blocks. And the problem with that is that not only are you severely changing the current structure, the structure that's out there, removing 90 percent of the trees, and severely reducing the biomass—but it leaves an interim structure, that is, the immediate structure before the development of the understory, and before the growth of the trees and the development of some other tree structure, canopy structure—that the interim habitat for wildlife—well, basically that we don't know what those effects are going to have on the wildlife. And done on small scale, especially the early parts were just experimental to gather data, and to see how the structure changed and what effects this appeared to have—but done on a larger scale, that the effects on wildlife could be extreme, could be severe, and possibly disastrous for particular species.

Now, I'm not a wildlife biologist, but looking through the literature, we certainly know that the squirrels, the Abert squirrel that we have here, is not going to be able to utilize that particular forest structure very well. And then there's a lot of songbirds that currently—there's experimental data coming in—or, not experimental, but monitoring data coming in from Mount Trumbull where the Ecological Restoration Institute is also implementing the presettlement prescription—the monitoring data that's coming down is showing that there may be very harmful impacts on songbirds.

But besides that, in the interim, directly after cutting, you've also opened up the structure, you've opened up the canopy, so that much more sun hits the forest floor, and you have a much drier forest floor, and you've got higher wind speeds because you've opened up the structure so that the wind can move quicker through the stand, and you also have a tremendous amount of slash residue after the implementation of this thinning treatment. So actually, in the time directly after doing the cutting for restoration, you have much higher risk of fire and the risk of extreme fire behavior, because you've set up these conditions that can lead to such extreme fire behavior.

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